


Redemption

by dareyoutoread



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:45:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dareyoutoread/pseuds/dareyoutoread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance." - Richard von Weizsaecker</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry; it's a multi-chap. :-)

The car pulls up to the Citadel gates an hour after dawn. It’s a wreck - black smoke billows from the engine block; the left rear tire is shredded and flapping; it’s missing all but one of its doors and half the roof, and the sides are painted with blood and gore - giant, dust-covered splatters and a liberal smear that runs practically the length of the one remaining driver’s side door.

The War Boys holler her down to the gate right away. One look and she doesn’t wonder why: the vehicle looks like a hulk of slag, but it exudes menace. 

Then a cry comes from the moving wreckage:

“Furiosa!” and a tiny arm pokes out the busted driver’s side window, waving a strip of pale cloth. 

It’s a _kid_ driving the car, and he can’t be more than ten, she sees when he steps out onto the sand. Barefoot, wild-haired, toting a gun that’s almost too big for his hands, jaw set and eyes sparking up at the wall of War Boys defiantly. 

“You Furiosa what drove the War Rig an’ smashed up ‘Mmortan Joe?” 

She nods, careful, so he can see it through the dust and the smoke.

“You gonna' help us?”

She nods again, slow, and lowers her weapon. The War Boys watch and do the same.

“I’m going to come down and help. You have more people in there?” 

The boy jerks his head, sandy hair flapping. She takes that to mean a yes.

The car looks even worse from up close. It’s a miracle it even runs, and she wants to ask how far they drove it in this condition, where they even _came_ from, but first things first. She peers into the open back seat. The floor is covered in a pile of bloody rags, and just inside, there’s a second kid, probably seven, maybe eight, and just as dirty as the boy. She peers at Furiosa, wide-eyed.

“My name is Furiosa,” she starts, but apparently that’s all the girl needs, because she squirms forward and slides out the side of the car, shifting to stand solemnly next to Furiosa in silence. The girl jerks her chin at the inside of the car, and Furiosa leans into the dim interior.

Crouched inside is another girl, huddled mostly on the floor, clinging to the pile of rags. She can’t be more than three. Probably less. Shining blue eyes alive with terror. Furiosa sighs, throttling her rage at the world, and reaches for the child.

The girl screams. Piercing, panicked screams that have the War Boys on the wall jumping to arms all over again. Furiosa leans out of the car and waves them down, then turns to the girl.

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry. I won’t hurt you. But look, your brother and sister are going inside - don’t you want to go with them?”

The girl shivers and fists her hands tighter in the blood-soaked rags, shaking her head.

“You don’t want to go with them?”

“Ma…” The poor kid’s shaking with fear, and Furiosa barely understands her until she repeats herself. “Ma... Ma!”

“Your mother isn't here." She's probably going to have to drag this poor kid out of the car. "Your brother and sister…” Suddenly, she takes in the scene again, with a sickening lurch.

The pile of rags on the floor.

Blood-soaked rags.

Blood-soaked _clothes_.

_Shit._ She hollers for the closest War Boys. They have to haul the tiny girl kicking and screaming out of the car, wrench her away from what has to be a body ( _her mother’s body_ ). One of the Boys helps Furiosa drag the corpse out onto the sand (and it’s surprisingly heavy), and it’s foolish to even hope, but she pulls on the gore-sticky fabric anyway and shifts the body onto its back - 

\- and everything stops.

“Maaaaaaaa!!!!!!” the child wails. “Ma! Ma!”

Dimly, Furiosa feels her own violent twitch of surprise, hears a few muffled gasps from the closest War Boys. But everything else is blocked out as she finally puts together the child’s garbled shrieking and the sight in front of her.

Ma. Ma.

_Max._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING for this chapter only: (Very brief) Implied rape. Nothing shown or even explicitly stated, but I respect you readers and didn't want to catch anyone off guard.

**_Three weeks earlier…_**

In a world of fire and blood, it’s the girl’s eyes that bring him around. _Help us, Max…_ He twitches, stops his finger on the trigger for a breath.

“Please...we’re sorry...we didn’t know anyone was here…” The words trickle slowly into his brain, and there’s something he should do here…

 _We are not things…_ He shakes his head, trying to clear the voices.

“Please…” It’s a man speaking; he’s holding his hands up at Max and they’re empty and the little girl is blinking up at him - _Max, save us, Max_ \- and his hand shakes but he lowers the shotgun to his side. Shakes his head again.

He can’t remember. What is he supposed to do?

Outside the cave, a woman bursts into tears. A boy sprints in and snatches up the girl - _blue eyes, dark curly hair_ \- and Max almost pulls the gun again, out of reflex.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you - we’re so sorry, please, we’ll just go…” More words, the man, the boy backing out of the cave, and still that unflinching look from those tiny, bright blue eyes, carried on the boy’s shoulder - 

He should - 

_Help us..._

There’s something he should - 

“Stop.” His own voice sounds strange to his ears again, and his throat rasps, painful. 

The man freezes, desperation licking his features. He’s about to speak again, but Max forces the words out first:

“There’s a place. Safe. Water. Food. It’s far. I can give you the bearing. I - ” _You were supposed to help us, Max…_ He holsters the shotgun, rubbing at his eyes. Clears his throat. “I’m sorry.” 

The man and his wife don’t talk much while he scratches out the map on the hood of their crumbling Ute. They hang back, waiting for him to turn and bite them. He can’t blame them. There are three kids, he sees. The boy, holding the little one tight and glaring at Max like he’d like to put a round in his skull. A girl, younger, crouched in the truck bed with wide, solemn eyes. And the little one. Blue-Eyes. Ghost Girl. 

He finishes the map, looks at the man. “You got weapons?” The man shakes his head, still shifted back onto his heels. Ready to run.

Max grunts, crosses a few feet to his car, pulls off the sand-colored tarp. Fishes around in the wreckage till he finds the box. Three pistols, a couple of matching rounds each, and a second shotgun with no shells. He pulls out one of the pistols, loads two rounds. Better than nothing.

He crosses back to the man, shoves the gun into his hand. “Two shots. Act like you’ve got more. Don’t stop for anything. Two, maybe three weeks that way.” He points, reiterating the bearing. “Stay off the roads.” 

“If it’s safe, why didn’t you stay?” That’s the woman, and her husband shoots her a quick, angry look for the question. _Don’t poke the dog; it might bite._

_Why, Max? Why didn’t you help us?_

_Where is the Green Place? You passed it._

_MAX! Help us, Max..._

Max’s fingers twitch, reflexive, for the shotgun again. _Why’d you leave? I was taken as a child. Stolen._

He looks up. _Little blue eyes_ , staring at the man with the tattered coat and the wild face. He thinks - there are things of the Road and things of home. Green growing things, and dust and blood and violent hands. He is a thing of the Road. He can’t get the words out. Instead, he looks at the woman. 

_If it’s safe, why didn’t you stay?_

His throat rumbles. “To keep it that way.” 

The man maybe wants to ask more questions, but doesn’t. Instead, the boy and the two girls pile in the back of the truck - _blue eyes, dark curly hair_ \- and Max steps back, out of the way. The man leans out the truck window, lifts the gun awkwardly. “Thank you.” He sets it back down and wrestles the ancient Ute into gear. Suddenly, a tiny hand flits up from the bed of the truck and waves at Max. 

He raises his hand in old, old, half-remembered reflex before the little girl’s brother bats hers down. Blue eyes. Curly dark hair. _Where is the Green Place? Why didn’t you stay?_

The truck disappears over the horizon, and Max drops his hand. Returns to the cave.

…

That night, he feels the motors before he hears them. There’s a rumble shimmying through the ground, unsettled and dangerous. He’s up and into the car, guns loaded, engine prepped to roar to life, one hand out the window ready to yank the tarp in if they find him. He can hear them coming now, four - no, five - engines, and he hasn’t seen a war party this big since he’d been strapped and gagged and drained for his blood at the front of one.

_We are not things. ...Max. My name is Max._

They pass within fifty feet, their violence rumbling in the air, bleeding through his arms and making him clench his fists around the shotgun, the wheel. It’s a near miss. Then they turn, and he hears them wheel off down the slope, away, away. He sits still for another hour, until he can no longer feel the rumble of the motors.

In the morning, for some reason he can’t explain, he follows them. An instinct, maybe, to keep the danger in front of him instead of behind. He has too much behind him already. He moves slow, keeps to the tracks to hide his own, watches the horizon for dust. Still, he doesn’t realize how close he’s getting until a circle of hack-welded rigs comes into view over a hill. He throws the car into reverse - their engines are too loud to hear his, so unless they've seen him - and then catches sight of something else down there:

A broken-down Ute.

_you can’t fix what’s broken_

Every single instinct screams to run.

. _..need you here..._

He reverses down an embankment, kills the engine. _Help us._

_...may have to drive the rig..._

He checks his shotgun. Checks the other gun. Loads up two more pistols and stuffs them in his belt. Tugs out a cracked pair of binoculars.

Finally, he crawls more than steps out of the car and slides up the embankment on his belly. Squints, blinking against the sun and sand and grit, and peers through the cracked glass.

They’re dragging the man and woman out of the truck, pinning them to the ground. No sign of the kids. Hiding in the back of the truck? He sweeps the binoculars over again. There. Tuft of sandy hair sticking out from under a blanket. 

The man and woman are screaming, probably - he can’t hear it over the engine noise. He doesn’t turn the binoculars back on them. He knows what he’d see. 

He should turn around and leave.

He loses time somewhere between there and crouching next to the truck, legs burning, shotgun clutched in his left hand, tapping softly - enough to transfer the vibrations, not enough for sound - on the side with his right. A sandy brown head peers over the side for a split second, then is gone. A second later, the older girl drops into the sand at his right. He nods at her, slow, and jerks his head back up. Then it’s the boy, with the little one clutched in his arms, one hand firmly over her mouth. They make more noise than the girl; he holds his breath and tenses and waits for someone to come around the edge of the truck, holds the shotgun ready to fire…

No one comes. 

He motions to the boy and girl. The girl just blinks at him, wide-eyed. A scream splits the air behind them, and she turns, looks back. The boy shoves her shoulder with his own and gets her moving. Smart kid. Don’t look back.

They run.

…

Back at the car, he loads them into the back seat, shoves gear, guns aside, and then points at the folded-up tarp. “We get into any trouble, you get under there, understand?” The boy nods, and huddles with his sisters as Max shuts the door. 

He drops into the driver’s seat and starts the car up slowly, gritting his teeth at the noise. 

“We have to go back!” It’s the first he’s heard the girl speak, and it startles him, almost makes him kill the engine. 

“No.”

_We have to go back._

_She went under the wheels._

“But we have to - ” The girl is crying now, panicking, and it’s setting off her sister too, and suddenly the boy can’t keep a hold on her shrieks, and _damn it_ , that war party is _going to hear_ \- 

“They’re dead.” For a minute, Max doesn’t realize it’s the boy and not him who’s spoken the words. He looks back into the back seat, at three shadowed, tear-streaked faces. The little girl’s shrieking has calmed to a whimper. _Blue eyes. Dead eyes._

Max fixes the boy with his gaze. As gently as he can manage: “We can’t go back.” The boy nods. Slower, shaky, still choking back sobs, the girl nods too. The little one just stares at him. Piercing blue eyes.

 _Why didn’t you help us, Max?_ He turns to the wheel, scratches at the back of his neck. Slow, quiet, puts the car in gear.

They drive for four hours, well past dark, before the boy speaks again:

“Where are you taking us?”

“Somewhere safe.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little gruesome here, maybe, but if you can't handle blood and guts, you probably didn't see the movie.

He’s dead. He must be. No one who looks like that could possibly be alive.

She leans down in the sand anyway, gritty heat scorching through the knees of her pants, and puts her ear over his mouth. Hovers there for an endless second, listening, straining…

The whisper of a breath ghosts across her ear. It could be her imagination, but it’s enough. Enough for hope.

_Hope is a mistake_ , she hears, low and rumbled into the night air. 

She’s going to make it anyway.

“Get him up.” She jerks her head at the nearest War Boys. “Up to the Skin Shop, quick as you can. Don’t jostle.” She looks ahead at the sheer amount of blood soaking Max’s clothing, hopes - in defiance of his advice - that it’s not all his. “We’re gonna need some volunteer blood bags. Do we know his type?” It’s a testament to how overworked she is that she doesn’t think of it right away. _Of course. Blood bag._ “Wait. It’ll be on his back. Find him a match. Several.” The War Boys nod and grab Max’s body in a grisly parody of a victory parade, hoisting him above their shoulders. The gates swing open, and Furiosa looks around suddenly for the kids. 

They haven’t moved, five feet away. The oldest has gotten ahold of the little one again, though she’s still squirming and crying for Max. Furiosa wipes a hand across her eyes. She crouches down, ignoring the way her knees ache, puts herself on eye level with the boy. “You’ll be safe here. All of you. There’s food, and water, and you can stay as long as you like.” 

The boy jerks his head, eyes tracking Max’s pallbearers. “An’ him?” 

“We won’t hurt him. We’re going to patch him up.” 

“We want to stay with him.” The middle child this time. Furiosa looks at her, quiet but insistent, and is reminded of Angharad’s steel strength. 

Max is probably going to die. She doesn’t know these children’s stories, but she can guess how cruel it would be to subject them to another in what is probably a long line of deaths. 

But this is the world, and sometimes a chance to say goodbye is better than none. She looks at the three of them, dirty and battered, huddled together against the wind, and decides it would be crueler not to.

“Fine. Come with me.”

She leads them in and up the spiraling Citadel passageways, toward the Skin Shop, stopping on the way to deliver orders. She grabs a War Boy named Dagga by the arm as she passes - he’s proven reliable, would be one of her Imperators if she had such things - and asks him to have that wreck of a car dragged in. He nods, and doesn’t argue. She sends two of the Pups to look for Cheedo - “Ask her to bring some breakfast and water up to the Skin Shop - three plates.” - swings into the nursery to tell the Dag to make up some extra beds for the night, and makes a last stop at the watch tower to ensure the sentinels have their post orders for the day. Everything else should hang together without her for a few hours. 

She’s not stalling, not exactly, but she doesn’t hurry as she winds down the last hallway to the Skin Shop, her three silent shadows still in tow. She pauses at the door, flesh hand gripping the doorframe. “I need you three to stay out of the way, all right? We’re going to try to help your friend.”

“Max,” the boy pipes up. “His name is Max.” _Max. My name is Max._ Furiosa just nods, too quickly, and almost turns before she thinks to ask them:

“What are your names? How do I call you?”

The boy hesitates for a moment. There’s a wariness in his eyes, an edge of feral caution that, combined with the tilt of his head and the jut of his jaw, reminds her almost painfully of Max. Finally, he nods, slow.

“Sprocket.” He points at himself. “Adda,” - at the older girl - “Bitz,” - at the younger. Furiosa takes a moment to commit the names to memory and nods back at the boy, an acknowledgement of his gift of trust. 

“Furiosa,” she reminds them. “If you need anything, Sprocket, ask for me.” 

Then she takes a breath, and turns the corner into the Skin Shop.

The room is only half full - a point of pride that she’s managed to keep them _out_ of more conflicts than she’s gotten them into. A few sick War Boys, nearing the ends of their half-lives, but at least now treated with respect and compassion. A War Pup who had managed to get himself tangled in the gears of the machinery that drove the water pumps. He’d make it, but he’d lost most of his left leg. One of the former milking mothers - Valduhluh, she thinks? - who had contracted an infection from a wound she’d sustained while _gardening_ , of all things. A half dozen more. 

And Max.

He’s laid out on a table, face-down. The damage is even worse, from this angle. The worst of it looks to be the deep gash that runs the entire length of his back, from neck to hip. She can’t see the full extent of the injury, but his jacket is shredded. She’s seen similar wounds on dead War Boys from getting caught under a car hook. She thinks about that missing section of roof on the car, and winces. 

She sweeps her eyes over the rest of him. Blood has soaked through his jacket and pants from a dozen or so smaller wounds, and his left arm hangs at an impossible angle. 

She wants to ask if he’s still breathing. It doesn’t look like it, but they wouldn’t still be working on him if he wasn’t.

“He’s got a bullet wound on his hip, too.” There’s Toast the Knowing, appearing from behind two of the volunteer blood bags (two at once, so he must be losing blood fast) to gesture to the Recorder, a six-month refugee who’d proven his worth with a perfect memory. As well, he’d had some basic knowledge of how to stitch flesh back together, so Toast had welcomed him into the Skin Shop almost immediately. He could rattle off the medical records of anyone in the Citadel who’d ever visited him. He looks tired now, and harried, running a nervous hand through his scruffy brown hair.

“Help me with his jacket. I can’t work on him like this.” Furiosa startles when she realizes Toast is talking to her. In two years, the Sister has traded in a love of book learning for an intense study of human mechanics. Some of the less worshipful War Boys call her the Death-Eater. Furiosa supposes she understands. Toast spends enough time pulling apart corpses to see how they tick. Not everyone would enjoy that. But she has made the Skin Shop her domain, and these days, the Sister speaks with an authority that still surprises Furiosa.

She puts her hands on Max’s jacket, trying to figure out how to pull it off without twisting it over his broken arm. Toast hands her a knife. “Use this.” Furiosa sighs, and goes to work on the scarred leather. A minute later, she’s peeling her half of the jacket back from blood-tacky skin while Toast and the Recorder do the same on the other side. 

It’s even worse underneath. She actually turns away for a moment, sucking in a breath that’s not filled with the stench of blood - and catches the eyes of the smallest child, solemn and piercing blue. She swivels back. 

A two, three-inch wide gash carves his back open, flaying aside skin and muscle. Peeled practically to the bone. It’s weeping blood slowly, the edges of the flesh layered in black crust.

“How long - ?” 

Toast doesn’t make her finish her sentence. “He’s had it three days, at least. Don’t know how he didn’t bleed out.” 

It’s a miracle it missed his spine. Furiosa accepts bandages from Toast, precious antiseptics - lamb’s ear and crushed rose and wort from the gardens - and begins to treat the smaller wounds while Toast and the Recorder work on the worst one, cutting aside dead flesh, cauterizing, stitching together what can be stitched. She checks the wound at his hip - through and through. Small mercies. At least she doesn’t have to dig a bullet out of his hipbone. 

It’s an hour before they get the bleeding completely stopped, and they’ve run through four out of five of their volunteer blood bags just trying to top him back up. She’ll have to send someone to round up some more.

“Now the arm.” The fingers of her mechanical hand twitch. _Now the arm._ But Toast is pushing her gently aside and touching Max’s arm like she’s puzzling something out, and she’s not holding a knife. A minute later, Toast gives a small, grim smile and _twists_ until she feels the broken ends of the bones settle into place. The Recorder hands her splint metal, and suddenly, incongruously, Furiosa almost laughs: The splints are made out of the tines of a garden fork. 

The same thing they used to make muzzles out of. 

Maybe he’ll live to appreciate the irony. 

She spares a moment she could not have before to look at their patient’s face. He’s passed out still, cheek pressed to the flat of the table, blood-matted hair falling partly over his eyes. A gash on his chin that she’d missed before. It cuts a line of red through the thick stubble. He looks older. Maybe it’s the injuries. Two years isn’t that long.

Suddenly, a tiny hand reaches up into her line of vision and plants itself right on Max’s nose. “Ma?” The boy’s there quick, and he’s already pulling the little girl away, but not before Furiosa’s vision goes a little blurry. She swallows. Thinks she’s just tired from being up all night and not eating breakfast.

Toast is standing on the other side of the table, staring at the child with sudden tears in her eyes. Furiosa rubs her face, tries to find some words.

“Now what?” is all she can coax out.

Toast composes herself. Glances down at Max again, running a tally like Capable runs engine assessments in her head. Finally, she looks up, solemn. Raises her eyes to meet Furiosa’s.

“Now we wait.” 

…

An hour before sundown, Max stops breathing. They hook him up to a car battery; give him a jump start. 

They have to do it twice before it works. 

The kids are sleeping in the corner of the Skin Shop, curled up on the floor. Cheedo finally arrives and drags them to the nursery, but not before the boy extracts a solemn promise from Furiosa to watch over Max.

She does. Back to the wall, knees bent in front of her. Her metal arm leaned against the wall. She counts the hours, watches the stars track through the sky through the single window. Tracks the shadows across Max’s face.

In the dead part of the night, she stretches, comes to stand by the table, looking down at him. Their Fool, who helped because he was there. She remembers the Dag, praying to _anyone who’s listening_ , and for the first time, thinks there might be wisdom in that.

When the sun rises the next morning, he is still breathing. 

She knows, because she’s taken each breath with him.

Toast has hardly left all night - the War Boys bring her food and the Recorder takes her place for two half-hour naps - but when the daylight starts to creep into the corridors, she relaxes visibly. When it’s time for the next day’s sentinel duty, Furiosa straps on her metal arm and looks a question at her, and Toast nods.

“Go. He came through the night. It’s a good sign.” 

She slips out into the corridor harboring a feeling. She won’t yet name it _hope_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: A little graphic to help you with this chapter. Think of something like this: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs23/i/2007/325/5/8/post_apocalyptic_scenery_by_Pericolos0.jpg when they go to The Cauldron. But, y’know, where the bridge is over a giant freaking Chasm of Doom and is actually the only way in and out of the city. ;-)
> 
> Also, I'm not really making every chapter longer than the last one on purpose. It just sort of keeps happening. #thisstoryissooutofcontrolalreadyandwe'reonlyonchapter4

Sometime in the middle of the night, the boy and the little one move into the front seat. Max is still driving - putting distance between them and the war party, listening to the engine hum and trying not to listen to anything else.

_Where were you, Max…_

He scrubs his fingers through his hair. _Here._ He’s _here_ , _now_ , and they’re _not._ They’re _dead._

The boy has his hands on the dash, peering out into the night. It’s just sand - miles and miles of it, and more sand after that, and Max can’t quite wrangle an answer into his brain as to why the boy looks. What’s he looking _for_?

_They’re looking for hope._

_Hope is a mistake._

Suddenly, something presses up against his side. He nearly pulls the damn wheel hard enough to flip the car. He does twitch, violently, and the something stirs, pushing against his jacket.

He strangles back his instinct to flee, looks down. Ignores the way his heart is pounding in his throat.

It’s the little girl. Ignored by her brother and left to the middle seat alone, she must have gotten cold, because she’s now trying to burrow her way under Max’s jacket in her sleep. 

“Hey,” he grunts at the older kid. The boy turns his head, but makes no move to pull his sister away. Surprise wells up from somewhere dark, meanders slowly through Max's hands. They twitch on the wheel. “Blanket.” He jerks a thumb at the back seat. Obligingly, the kid moves, then, fishes out a blanket that smells of dust and guzzoline and drapes it over the little one so she loosens her death grip on Max’s coat. _Blue eyes, dead eyes._ He blinks, squeezes his eyes shut for a second. Looks back down.

She’s fast asleep, head pillowed against his ribs, face pressing into his dirty jacket. She’s warm and solid - he can feel the weight when he breathes in and out - and it reminds him she’s not a nightmare. _Blue Eyes, Not-Ghost Girl._

He tries not to move. 

“What’s her name?” he rumbles, suddenly, startling himself a little with the question.

He doesn’t turn his eyes off the road, but he can feel the boy’s regard. Finally: “Bitz.” There’s a long pause, then the kid picks up again: “‘m Sprocket. ...An’ that’s Adda.” 

“Max,” he offers, unexpectedly. And then, because apparently this is a decision he’s made now, he repeats: “I’m Max.”

The boy nods, and that’s that. They drive the rest of the night in silence, that small, warm weight curled up against Max’s side. 

…

They run out of water after three days. He’d budgeted his own rations to last for a week, and that was on a couple swallows a day. The kids drink more, and he’d known this was going to be a problem, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it except keep scanning the horizon for another source. 

Which he hasn’t found.

He’s got one option, and it’s a bad one.

And it’s three hundred miles out of their way. 

He pushes on instead, hoping - _mistake_ \- to find something else, _anything_ else. 

At the end of the fifth day, the little girl stops even asking for water. Goes quiet and feverish and still. _Why didn’t you help us… You were supposed to help us… You promised… You promised… Why didn’t you save us, Max?... Liar, liar, you didn’t help you can’t help can’t can’t won’t ever be able to save -_

He rips the wheel around, jams the gas pedal and fangs it toward The Cauldron. 

…

They make it in five hours. One man with three kids is too much of a target, so he leaves the boy with his sisters and three loaded guns, buries the car in a sandbank and covers it with the tarp. He pops the glovebox and digs out the only thing he’s got worth trading. Tells the boy - feverish and sunken-eyed - to shoot anyone who tries to open the door. Sets out on foot, with a knife, an empty jug, and a shotgun with one shell, dry-mouthed and trying to ignore a building swirl of voices. _Why’d you leave? Stolen. Don’t leave us. Why didn’t you help? Why can’t you_ ever _help?_

He growls, swiping at his eyes. He’s nearly to the Bridge. 

The Cauldron is a fortress, built on a hill backed by a cliff face and fronted by a massive chasm. There’s exactly one public way in or out - over the rotting suspension bridge that spans the quarter kilometer over the cavern. 

To cross the Bridge, you need a barter. 

Max reaches into his pocket, fiddles with the bag he’s stored there. Plucks out a handful of tiny seeds. 

When he plunks them in front of the Bridge Keeper, she smiles, and waves back the guards. “Fare well, traveler.” 

He’s never liked the welcome here. There’s a niggling feeling it actually means “goodbye.” 

He nods, and clangs his way onto the Bridge. He doesn’t mind heights, truly, but nor does he have much experience with them, and he grunts, grudgingly impressed, as he crosses the creaking steel monstrosity. The deck sways slightly under his boots, shifted by the wind that whips through the canyon. Halfway across, he stops for just a moment. Looks down into the chasm. You could fit the height and breadth of the Citadel inside it twice. He moves on when the wind starts to carry too many whispers up to him.

The guards on the other side stop him again. Max’s hands twitch, clenching and unclenching. Patience. _Max… Help us…_

“What’s your purpose here?”

“Trade.” 

“What for?”

“Water.”

The guards look at each other for an incredulous second, then bust out laughing. Two quick movements, he could sever both of their windpipes with his knife. They’d never see it coming. 

He’s mildly surprised, a moment later, when they’re still alive.

“You must be carrying a year’s supply of guzzoline under that jacket, mister, if you’re planning to trade for water here.”

Max waits, fingertips resting next to the knife.

“Cauldron dried up a year ago. You been gone too long.” _You been gone too long._ It feels like condemnation. 

_Why’d you leave?..._

_...why didn’t you stay?_

It’s too late to turn around. It’s here or nowhere. Max raises his eyes to the guards. For the first time, they actually look at him - and step immediately out of his way. 

He brushes past, and into the city.

…

He’s never been more aware of the hours until sunset. He’s been in the city a damned half hour and he isn’t any closer to a trade. He’s twitchy, too aware of his own skin, jumping at noises and starting to pull his knife every time someone jostles him. It’s hell, and he’s _still not making any progress_. 

He’s been to the Cauldron, of course. Went there first, to find a patch of muddy dirt surrounded by fifty guards and five turret guns. All the water’s pumped out, they tell him, standing sadly at his elbow as he stares into the dirt - _Why couldn’t you help…_ \- and swallows through a too-dry throat. 

The people who work in the city, they get their share from the overlords, they tell him. But no one seems willing to trade (“I’ve only got what I need”), and he doubts he could pay what they’d ask, if anybody was fucking asking. 

So he does what the desperate do. He looks around for someone more desperate. Thieves, junkies, dealers in violence and blood - _somebody’s_ got to need _something_ more than Max needs water. 

In the end, he finds it. A back-alley deal; a thing someone needs stolen. He makes the deal. They make a plan.

…

It’s not a thing. Not a thing, and it’s probably going to get him killed, and he wonders why he didn’t just steal the water. 

But the brother of a junkie is rotting in the Cauldron prison, and the junkie wants him out. Max thinks about the stupidity of breaking into a prison to avoid being thrown into one for stealing water. But the hours are ticking by, and he hasn’t got another plan. This is it. Here or nowhere.

He breaks in. Kills three guards, incapacitates a couple more, blows the lock on the cell with his only shotgun shell and drags the brother out and up the stairs, through a maze of catacombs, and back to the junkie’s chop shop. He takes a round to the hip for his trouble and when he gets back, the junkie smiles and says, “Now you get us out of town.” 

He breaks the junkie’s arm when he tries to pull a gun, points his empty shotgun at the brother, and picks up his filled water jug. Twitches his eyes across the room, once. “That box there.” Jerks his head at the brother. The brother looks at him strangely, but grabs the box and hands it over. Max backs out of the shop, disappears into the dusk.

…

He’s halfway across the Bridge when the alarm sounds. He comes one breath from bolting at the sound, but the guards at both ends have snapped to attention. They’d shoot him down before he took two steps.

So he walks, casual, down the Bridge, while panic sparks through every nerve, coils in each of his muscles. Nods at the guards on the end.

“Sorry,” the Bridge Keeper says, and she actually sounds it. “Can’t let anyone through till the alarms stop.” Max nods, wants to say _I’m sorry_ , but it's late, might already be too late, and there's panic plucking at his spine and _blue eyes dead eyes dark hair dead eyes_ and twin ghosts dancing through his brain and he has his knife at the Keeper's throat and her body for a shield before she can scream.

Her guards shoot her immediately. He rushes them as the rounds hit, _thunk thunk thunk_. Bowls the middle one right over the side of the Bridge into the chasm. Takes the second one in the back of the head with his knife. Feels his head snap back as the third one clocks him with the butt of his rifle, hard enough to leave his ears ringing. 

A shot whistles past his ear from the far side of the Bridge. The third guard flinches too, looks just over his shoulder, and it’s all the opening Max needs. He barrels the man into the Bridge railing - 

\- and misjudges the force. There’s wind and a terrible slow slide and a scream from the guard, and then they both pitch over the edge.

At the last second, he flails a hand out, hits a support beam. Claws into it with everything he has. There’s a _wrench_ in his shoulder and for an insane second, he thinks of a mechanical arm, latching onto the metal of his brace. 

He pulls himself up, howling with the effort, picks up the water and the box and _runs_.

…

For a moment, he can’t find the car, and he’s lost to the sands and the dark and the voices crowding in. _Can’t save us… Help us… Why, Max? Why? HELP US, MAX…Blue eyes dark hair dead eyes dark hair and whywhywhywhywhywhyWHY, MAX?_ He stumbles on the dunes, injured leg going out from under him, flails a hand out to catch himself - 

\- and hits tarp-covered metal.

The boy almost shoots him before he realizes who it is.

…

Later that night, they’re hauling ass through the desert as fast as the throttled-up engine can carry them. Sprocket sprawled out against the dashboard, Adda wrapped in the tarp in the back.

Max feels a spike of pain in his injured hip and looks down to find the girl - _Bitz_ , he names her silently, and it’s a reminder. Not Ghost Girl. Not dead one. _Alive._ He looks at the jug of water resting on the floorboards, and for a moment, inside his head, it's quiet.

Bitz pushes into his side and he grunts in pain, reaches down to tug the blanket snugger around her, and leaves her where she is.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A whole day without a new chapter - I must be slacking. ;-) Here, have an extra long one to make up for it. 
> 
> (Also, comments are water. Or food. Or guzzoline. Or whatever scarce resource you want to imagine in the post apocalyptic wasteland of my writing. If we were in Bartertown, I'd barter you 100 words per comment. Good deal, eh? :-D )
> 
> Oh, finally, a point of clarification: My headcanon for this story is that Max somehow dug up and re-cobbled together the wreck of his Interceptor at some point over the last two years, and that's the car they drove into the Citadel. (Just go with it - it's not like anything /else/ in Mad Max's continuity makes all that much sense... ;-) )

It’s three days before Max stirs.

He comes awake fighting, which she should have expected. It takes four War Boys to hold him down, and he tears half his stitches and nearly re-breaks the arm before Furiosa gets there, called from the watchtower by Sprocket, who’d come sprinting down the maze of corridors the moment Max blinked awake. 

Toast is shouting, “Max! _Max!_ ” and trying - foolishly - to help the nearest War Boy in his losing battle when Furiosa rounds the corner, takes in the scene, and bellows,

“FOOL!” as loudly as she can. 

Max stops. 

_Everyone_ stops.

In the absolute silence that follows, she can hear the soft _pat, pat_ of blood dripping onto the stone floor. 

After a moment, Max tilts his head, blinks hard, twice - and a little of the wildness drains from his eyes, replaced with confusion. He’s made it to his feet, somehow, the War Boys immediately backing off to a safe distance to nurse their wounds. 

Furiosa stays where she is. “You’re back at the Citadel. The boy brought you.” Sprocket steps out from behind her and waves.

Furiosa has seen desperate mobs tearing each other apart for food and water. She’s seen crazed War Boys screaming for death to sweep them off to Valhalla on the Fury Road, fear in the eyes of their victims, panic on the faces of those about to die horrific. Fear, panic, desperation, insanity, in all their forms and guises.

She’s never seen anything like the look that crosses Max’s face now. But somehow she understands it, ringing in her head, as loud as if he’d screamed it: _No._

He’s looking at the boy - what? Wait, no; he’s looking at the empty space behind Sprocket…

… _oh_.

“The girls are here too. They’re fine.” No response. That same, wild-eyed look. “They’re _fine_ , Max.”

He flinches a little at the name, looks back at her, questioning. 

He doesn’t believe her - or can’t, quite. Needs more. She searches for the right thing to say. Finally, she takes a slow step closer, doesn’t let go of his eyes. “The little one was pissed as hell we had to cut up your jacket. I think she liked it.” 

The corner of Max’s mouth twists, and the tension finally bleeds out of him. Unfortunately, so does the adrenaline that had kept him standing. She sees it coming at the same moment Toast does, and both of them dive to support him. Mostly all they do is manage to break his fall.

He’s barely conscious by the time she manages to coax the War Boys close enough to help drag him back to the table and lay him out flat.

“Fool,” she mutters again, touching soft fingers to the line of torn stitches and coming away bloody. He grunts, somewhere between a protest and pain, and one of his hands twitches. “Hold still,” she murmurs. Despite the fact that she’s never seen him do so, he goes quiet, a careful kind of stillness that reminds her more of a snake coiled to strike than actual relaxation.

Toast approaches with a needle and Furiosa takes it, mouth quirking at Toast’s relieved expression. She turns back to Max, making sure to demonstrate her intention as obviously as possible before she touches him, and sets the needle at the first torn stitch. “I’m sorry.” ( _I’m so sorry_ wells up from some corner of her brain, followed by _pain_ , and then, blessedly, the ability to breathe.) 

She has to brace her metal hand lightly on his back to hold everything in place, right between _UNIVERSAL_ and _Road Warrior_ and she notes with a strange twist of pleasure that the new scarring has carved up so much of his back that Immortan Joe’s tattoos are mostly illegible.

Max’s back muscles tense at the touch, and she knows it’s less the cold metal of her hand and more the sense of being held down. Out of the corner of her eye, she can still read the section of the tattoo closest to his neck: _ISOLATE PSYCHOTIC. Keep muzzled._ She bares her teeth in empathy. They both know what it is to fight for their freedom far beyond reason or strategy - with claws and teeth and everything they have. 

So she’s careful - moving slow, touching and bracing no more than she has to. It’s got to be hard, to keep his back to her like this, even half-conscious. She won’t make light of it. 

In the half-hour it takes her to fix the stitches, he doesn’t make another sound. If not for the way his muscles work and twitch occasionally - mostly when she pulls too hard or hits a bad spot (well, worse spot) with the needle - she’d think he was unconscious again. Finally, she pulls the last stitch through, cuts the string with her teeth, and secures it.

“You going to break those again?” Her voice sounds loud in the mostly empty room. Toast is gone - probably to dinner, now that she looks at the angle of the sun slanting through the window - the War Boys are gone, and several of the other patients have been dismissed over the last three days, so it’s fairly quiet in the Skin Shop tonight. 

Max grunts, opens one blue eye and regards her blearily. She steps back, drops the needle in a bucket kept for such things, and scrubs her bloody hand against the leg of her pants. She really didn’t expect an answer, so when she turns her back and hears him rumble, “Probably,” she feels a jolt of surprise. 

She turns around to find his face still plastered to the table, head turned toward her, eyes drifted shut. He looks beaten and bloody still, but less pale. And the corner of his mouth is twisted upward just a fraction. 

Is he _joking_ with her? Their time together on the Road had little room for humor; she’d assumed he’d lost the ability, along with whatever else he’d lost before he’d been tied and muzzled and thrown into their outgunned war. She’s not good at humor herself, but the Sisters, some of the Mothers, and - oddly enough - even the younger War Pups have attempted to teach her over the last two years. To laugh. To enjoy a moment. To feel something lighter than determination and pain.

That she still had that ability had surprised her at the time. That _Max_ might still have it too surprises her even more. 

_Isolate. Psychotic._ Joe had tattooed lies on all of them, in one way or another.

She must be silent for too long, because he opens the eye again, half-lidded. His throat works - once, twice - then: “Fool,” he grunts, mouth twisting upward again. It’s an explanation. He _was_ joking. It’s a little like the first time she saw a flower bloom in the Citadel gardens. Unexpected - not impossible, but so unlikely it might as well have been.

“Fool,” she agrees, quietly. Before he closes his eyes, she reaches her hand out and rests it for a second on his shoulder. It’s just an impulse - something she’s picked up from the Sisters, a gesture of concern. Reassurance. 

Both of his eyes fly wide open, but he doesn’t start, doesn’t move. Just blinks up at her, questioning.

She doesn’t know how to answer the question there. Instead, she lifts her hand from his warm skin, nods. “Get some sleep.” 

He blinks again, bleary, and then his head lolls as he drops (probably) into unconsciousness again. She doesn’t know what to make of the fact that he waited for her to tell him it was all right. 

…

The second time he wakes, a day and a half later, he doesn’t try to kill anybody. He does jolt, hard enough to startle Toast and a dozen others who are working to save an injured War Boy several tables over, but then he settles. By the time the Dag casually mentions to Furiosa that Max is awake and moving, it’s two hours to the evening watch, and he’s sitting on the floor of the Skin Shop, slurping at a thin salt broth that Cheedo has brought up from the kitchens, surrounded by all three children _and_ two War Pups who have apparently made fast friends with Sprocket.

He looks relaxed - face still creased in pain, blood matted in his hair, one arm in a sling, shirtless and scarred and absolutely _filthy_ , but relaxed, and happy in a way she hasn’t seen before - smiling at the kids as he sips his broth, and, to her great surprise, _laughing_ \- a deep rumble as rusty as it is genuine.

“Tell us another!” one of the Pups demands, raising his fist like a gauntlet.

Furiosa slips into the room quietly, coming to stand just inside the entry, not wanting to interrupt. Max raises his eyes and inclines his head just slightly, acknowledging her presence. Sprocket immediately looks over his shoulder, a quick twitch of movement to check who’s at his back. It’s a sharp instinct, feral - one that even the War Pups don’t have. How long had they been living on the road?

“Once,” Max’s low voice begins. Sprocket snaps his head back around immediately. “...there was a tree.” 

“What’s a tree?” The quieter of the two Pups - Billy the Elsewise, she thinks his name is - interrupts immediately, only to be shushed by the first Pup. “Miss Dag told us about them, remember? They was green-tall and good for eating.”

“That’s fruit,” interjects Max, patient. “Grows on trees.”

“What’s fruit?” asks Adda, looking perplexed. 

“‘Ad some for breakfast this mornin’.” Sprocket fixes her with a glare. “Like carrots. Let ‘im tell the story!”

Max opens his mouth, but is almost immediately interrupted again. 

“Ma!” Bitz, sitting in Adda’s lap, wriggles suddenly and holds her arms out, then manages to get free - and launches herself straight at Max. Furiosa takes a step forward; Max sets his empty bowl down with his good hand as quickly as humanly possible before forty-five pounds of tiny girl collides with his dirty, beaten frame hard enough to draw a groan from his lips.

“Bitz!” Sprocket is on his feet and reaching to take the girl, but Max just sweeps Bitz onto his lap with his unbroken arm, then coughs, shifting his back in obvious pain, and tries once more to begin what Furiosa now expects is a made up story.

“There was a very special tree, because it was the last of its kind.”

“Like the car?” Sprocket pipes up, ignoring his own advice not to interrupt.

The War Pups look at each other and whisper. “V8...V8…” Is all Furiosa catches.

“Like the car,” and again, Max’s lips twist in what she’s quickly recognizing as amusement. 

“Furiosa saved it for you,” the boy interrupts again, and this time, Max’s gaze snaps straight up to her. She nods. His car is in the shop. Capable has made well and sure that none of the other blackthumbs touch it after finding that the gas tanks were rigged to blow. She says all this with a look, and Max returns a nod, looking unusually grateful, and - to his credit - a touch relieved that he hasn’t accidentally blown anyone up.

“So the tree - ” prompts Adda.

“It was taller than all the other trees in the forest - ”

She can see one of the War Pups jab the other one with his elbow when he starts to interrupt again. The Dag is going to have a lot of questions in her next set of lessons about trees and forests. 

Max goes on to spin a story - told in his rough, halting rumble, with many, _many_ interruptions from all of the children - about how the great tree gave shelter to many creatures, was cruelly cut down, but was saved by a child who picked up its acorn - and, who, many, many years later, planted it so the tree could grow again. She has not heard a story like this one since before the seven thousand days, and slowly, she finds herself sliding down the wall, resting against it to listen with the children.

By the time he finishes, Bitz is sleeping soundly, her head pillowed against his knee, dark curls covering her face. The War Pups are slack-jawed with amazement - they have probably heard so few stories _not_ about Valhalla, battle, or dying historic - and Sprocket and Adda are cheering and whooping enthusiastically.

Furiosa whistles, adding her approval to the mix, and suddenly Max ducks his head, looking uncomfortable under all the attention.

Sensing the shift, she stands to her feet and toes the closest children in the back, encouraging them to move. “Bedtime.”

“It’s only just past sundown,” Adda says, confused.

“Not yours,” Furiosa says without thinking. “Max’s.”

The raised-eyebrows look she gets from him is one of genuine surprise. She turns back to Adda to hide...whatever it is she’s feeling. “He’s very very tired and needs to rest, and you five have lessons to go to.”

“Stories are better than lessons,” mumbles one of the Pups, and then looks around like he’s afraid the Dag will leap out of a corner and scold him for it. 

Max snorts. Furiosa turns to him with a level stare.

“Go to your lessons,” he grunts, shifting Bitz off his knee to hand her to her older brother. All five kids immediately get busy filing out. 

When they’re gone, Furiosa looks down at Max, still seated on the floor, slumped forward a little over his knees. The wound on his back looks better - at least, he hasn’t burst any stitches - but it’s still an angry red, and the section that couldn’t be stitched looks weepy and painful. She regards him with a level look.

“How long you going to stay down there?”

He hesitates. Grunts. “Can’t get up.” 

Oh. Well then. She crouches - slow - and clasps his good arm with both of hers. “Come on.” Between the two of them, they leverage him to his feet. She gets her shoulder under his uninjured arm for balance, and he shifts, breathing a little ragged, and tries to move to the table. From this close, she can feel the stiffness in his movements - the nights he’s spent unconscious, laid out on a flat, unforgiving surface. 

She stops them both. Softly, quietly, not wanting to make a big deal out of it, knowing he’ll refuse if she does: “If you’re well enough for all that, I’d say you’re well enough to sleep in a real bed tonight.” 

He turns away slightly, looking uncomfortable. “Don’t need - ”

“Don’t want?” she challenges. He sighs then. Looks at the hard table. _Hrm_ s in affirmation.

It takes them ten minutes to make a two-minute walk, and when they get there, Max is panting and pale and Furiosa honestly isn’t much better after carrying most of his body weight most of the way there. She pushes open the door to the room and stumbles the two steps to the bed with a nearly unconscious Max. It takes the full strength of her mechanical arm and all her muscle to lever him into bed, face down, without jostling his broken arm or pulling at any of his stitches, and when she’s done, he just makes a soft hum low in his throat and slips immediately asleep. 

She stands there for a minute, rubbing her shoulder with metal fingers and thinking about trees and acorns and lone Road Warriors who rescue children. Max’s face, pressed into the pillow, is as peaceful as she’s ever seen it. Like everything here at the Citadel - like all of their progress and victories and accomplishments over the last two years - she hopes that it lasts.

She’s on watch again tonight, so after a moment, she slips out, closes the door behind her, and leaves Max to his dreamless sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the unconscionably long delay on this chapter. Thanks to all of you who are sticking with me, especially those who've been leaving comments and kudos. Y'all are amazing and make this fun! Anyway, I had a three day crisis about where this story was going and then realized I needed to just jam the accelerator and let it sort itself out. Y'know, Mad Max style. Enjoy the CARnage. ;-)

That night, the Bridge Keeper joins the chorus of the dead. They’re in the car, huddled for warmth, the little one tucked against his side again, when her form comes willowing across the dunes. Bitz doesn’t stir when he starts, banging his head against the cracked and peeling headrest, but Adda and Sprocket peer out the windshield, confused.

“Someb’y there?” Sprocket squints, trying to follow the track of Max’s eyes. Adda just melts back against the passenger door, halfway to invisible, clutches the knife Max had taught her how to use on the second day. The steel glints in the moonlight.

 _Max…_ He shakes his head. Not now, not now. He can feel Sprocket’s eyes jump between him and the sand. Finally, the boy settles back against the seat.

“Nothin’ there.” 

Max swivels, gives the boy a slow, eyebrow-raised look: _thanks, kid - got that_. 

“Whatcha see?” The kid pauses, meets Max’s furrowed eyebrows with a solid gaze. “Pa said - ” he pushes past a hitch in his voice - “He said you was desert-crazy. Mad man. Seein’ what weren’t there instead of us.” 

_Seein’ what weren’t there…_

_Max…_ The Bridge Keeper’s still standing there, insistent. Long robe billowing in the desert wind, three bullet holes gaping in her chest. 

“I saw Pa last night.” He wrenches his attention back to the kid. What?

“You knocked on the car an’ I kicked open the door an’ there was Pa, smilin’ big as anything. Almost snapped ‘im right in the chest.” 

Sprocket _had_ nearly shot him last night. He’d assumed it had been fear, reflex. Hadn’t figured a ten-year-old would have ghosts. 

Maybe everybody does, out here.

“It wasn’t real.” He dredges up the words from his own quiet, forms them into something that might help: “He’s dead.” 

“ _I_ know.” The boy gives him an odd look, like this should be obvious. “Thas’ why I was gonna’ shoot ‘im.”

Max wheezes. It’s almost - almost - a laugh. Child’s logic. _It’s not real. Just shoot it._ He thinks about pointing the shotgun out the open window, blowing another hole in the Bridge Keeper’s chest, and a half-formed smile cracks the surface of his face. 

The kid is waiting for him to say something else - staring at him strange - so he says, “Go to sleep,” and leans back against the seat, staring past the Bridge Keeper at the stars. 

…

They almost make it through the night before everything goes to hell. 

There’s no warning rumble, no sharp glint of moonlight off chrome, no lights. One second, he’s blinking out the front windshield, trying to keep his eyes open. The next, there’s a _crack_ , the splintering of glass, and the rear window of the car implodes. The kids scream, Max cranks the engine and jams the car into gear, and a second shot tears through the driver’s side door, grazing his shoulder. 

He swears and pushes the throttle as high as it’ll go. In all the noise, it takes him a second to realize that Sprocket has vaulted into the _back_ seat, pistol braced behind the busted window seam, and is firing off rounds at their pursuers. 

“Don’t waste it,” he snaps at the kid, wrenching the wheel to the right and trying to get a look behind him. What the fuck kind of vehicle could sneak up on them without him knowing? Another shot _zings_ through an open window, ripping a hole through the fabric-coated ceiling and just barely missing Max’s head. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches his first glimpse of a motorcycle. Peeling paint in Cauldron red and gold. _Fuck._

“How many?” he shouts to the kid, but it’s Adda who answers:

“Six bikes and two pursuit vehicles, further behind. Lancers on four of the bikes.”

He hands her the shotgun, pulls the second pistol out of his jacket. “Point.” He gestures. “Aim. Those lancers get close enough, you blow them away.” She nods, solemn, braces the shotgun on the window edge.

One of the bikes roars closer to the left window - bad decision. Max leans out - one second, two, lines up his shot - and the bike stutters and flips, front tire punctured.

The roar of a shotgun blast from his right, and Adda yelps, thrown back against her younger sister by the recoil. She drops the gun, latches onto Bitz. Outside, there’s the bright flash of an explosion as one bike careens into another. Three down. Good girl. 

“LANCER!” Sprocket screams and Max pitches the wheel left, feeling the rear tire jump as the lance explodes in the sand beside it. Shit. He guns the engine, willing the V8 just a little faster, just a little. If they can get lined out on a straightaway - 

_MAX!_ Blue eyes, dark hair, ghost hand thrown in his way, and Max flings his own hand up to protect his face and _slams_ on the brakes. There’s a screech of metal, a roar as the two bikes tailing them collide with the back of the Interceptor, and then Sprocket screams, “ _Go!_ GO GO GO GO _GO_!” and Max hits the gas out of reflex, tearing them away from the smoke and twisted metal. 

The boy returns to the front seat, forehead bloody, and _grins_ at him. “Mighta’ lost the last bike. Can’t see.” 

There aren’t any bullets flying at the moment, which Max counts as a win. He wrenches his shoulders around, scans the open desert behind them. Out of the smoke come the shadows of two pursuit vehicles. And the last bike. So much for luck. 

He’s got one shot left in his pistol, one in the shotgun, and the kid’s gun is empty - he’d heard it go off twice.

He scans the dunes - left, right, behind - _there_ , half a klick east: _road_. The V8 whines as he pushes it faster, down the hill. Then the tires hit packed dirt, scrabble and spin and suddenly the world lurches around them as the rubber finds purchase. 

For a second, the ghost of a familiar War Boy grins at him from the hood, spitting guzzoline into the intake.

Slowly, the Interceptor pulls ahead.

And then, inexplicably, the two pursuit vehicles blare their horns and drop off, peeling away into the desert. They round a turn - the straining Interceptor and the remaining bike - spitting up dust from their tires, air over the engines rippling with heat - and suddenly there’s something dark in front of them, but he can’t get a good look at it before there’s an impact and the back of the car explodes in flames. 

Both rear tires burst; the wheel rips out of his hands, and Max folds his body sideways over Bitz and Adda as the car flips. Rush of air, scream of metal, and then a second impact, much harder.

And then, for a second, nothing.

…

Ringing in his ears, something wet dripping on his face. Screams. Crying. Everything’s blurred - looks wrong, tilted wrong. 

_Max._ He snaps back awake, back pressed against the ceiling of the car. Blinks past blurred vision. There’s weight on his chest - both girls. Crying - probably okay. 

The scuff of sand outside the window. He grasps, desperate, for a gun. 

Then Sprocket crouches down next to the open window, looks at Max’s face upside down. Lifts a hand to catch the trail of guzzoline dripping off the frame. 

“Biker’s dead as dingos. Ran into the back when he popped us with the lance.” He holds out his hands. 

Max blinks at him for a minute, then picks up Bitz and passes her out the window to her brother. He and Adda drag themselves out a minute later, limping, coughing up sand and guzz. 

For a minute, he can’t actually believe that they’re all still alive. The car’s busted to hell and if that leaking tank blows, they’re going to be stranded with no food or water, but for just a second, he allows himself to feel something that’s almost - almost - like hope.

Then Sprocket says, “Fuck,” raises one hand to point. 

The dead scream with laughter.

Ahead of them - and moving their direction on the road - is the reason the pursuit vehicles had fled. Three, four hundred times the size of a War Rig, a fucking _city_ on wheels, a place Max has heard of and always managed to avoid, a monstrosity of metal and weapons staffed by Enforcers and run by a cannibalistic madman, a moving salvage heap that sucked in everything and everyone in its path.

He’s heard many tales. The nomads called it the Scrap Dragon, whispered the tales to scare their children around the fire. 

But the one he’d met who’d been there - the man who’d escaped, madder than Max and missing an arm and three fingers on his other hand…

He’d called it the Boneyard.

There’s no time to hide. _Your fault._ He jerks his head to the car. _Why couldn’t you save us?_ It’s leaking, damaged, flipped on its back. Might not even run. Rear tires shredded. 

But the fire’s out.

And it hasn’t exploded.

And it’s not like they’ve got another choice.

He grabs the kid by the shoulder, bats away the shotgun when the boy brings it up out of reflex. “Lancer’s poles. _Now_.”

Turns to the girl, wide-eyed. “Tools. Welding torch. In the back. Go.” He shoves her, lightly, till she’s stumbling toward the car. 

He strips the shredded tires in under a minute, grabs the spares from under the back. Only thing in the world he’s got spares of. It’s not luck - it’s survival instinct. Tires are an easy scavenge, and a lamed vehicle is a dead one. He tightens the last bolt, looks over his shoulder.

The Boneyard’s moving. Toward them.

Sprocket brings the lances - two left - and Max detonates the tips into the sand, then jams them under the frame, grunts at the boy. Car landed at an angle, roof sloping across a dune. Maybe they’ll have the leverage.

It’s fucking _hard_ , but there’s adrenaline hammering through his muscles and they manage it, just. The Interceptor rocks back onto the road upright with a not-so-encouraging _crash_ and a few more _clank_ s of shattering glass. 

He takes the torch from the girl, welds the frame back together where he can. Disconnects the leaking fuel tank, runs the line to the backup tank. Finally, he pops the hood, scans the engine. The intake is less trashed than he’d expected - he scrapes a handful of sand out, burns his hand, looks over his shoulder at the Boneyard.

It’s closer. A lot fucking closer. Any minute, some lookout Enforcer’s going to see them and all hell is going to rain down.

 _Max…_ No time, not now, _not now_ , damn it. 

_You let us die, Max…_

Bitz lets out a yelp - Adda’s dropped her - and it snaps him back. He’s lost count of the times he’s rebuilt this car with his own hands. It’ll have to be enough. 

“Back up.” He slides in through the window, waves a hand at the kids. They back away. Max puts a shaking hand on the ignition…

...turns it, slow and easy…

Please, fuck, don’t let him blow himself up.

The engine sputters, spits, coughs out a puff of smoke and sand, and he feathers the accelerator, pleading with it to _just please start_...

And with a roar, the V8 comes to life. 

The kids scramble in through the windows, gashing palms on cracked glass. Max shifts the engine into reverse - there’s a _screech_ and a whine as it protests the treatment, but it _moves_ and in moments, they’re roaring down the road in the opposite direction. 

Sprocket whoops and cheers and Adda hugs her sister closer and looks over their shoulders. It’s too much to hope they haven’t been seen - too much to hope anything. 

But they’re still driving, and it's not hope, and they're not out of the fire... But it’s something.

Maybe it'll be enough.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear, dear readers: I am grievously sorry for the long wait for this chapter. I must confess that I went on vacation and probably should have put this fic on a week's hiatus, but didn't. This chapter is ridiculously long, though, partially in apology but mostly because writing it felt like hacking paths through a jungle and in the end it just couldn't be any shorter, so enjoy! lol. ;-) You're all the best, and your continued comments are water in the desert. :-D Thanks for being awesome.

She stumbles on Sprocket five stories up, standing on a short wall with a drop all the way to the canyon floor behind him, telling a _story_ , of all things. She grabs the boy by the back of the neck and levers him off the wall, giving him a look that says very clearly, _stay on the fucking ground_. He lands on both feet, _grins_ at her, and doesn’t pause his tale:

“The Lancer squints inta the sun, an’ slams ‘is lance home in the Dragon’s side- _Smash_! RAH!!”

Several of the War Pups in his audience twitch back at the outburst, but Bitz, in the front row, echoes, “Raaaahhh!!” and waves her little arms. Adda wrangles her back into place.

“An’ the Dragon spits fire like a hundred flamers, but it don’t hurt the Lancer, on ‘count of his jacket - ”

“Never seen a jacket wouldn’t burn!” shouts one of the older War Pups. 

Sprocket glares him down. “This one don’t.”

“It’s chrome?” says one of the other Pups, and Furiosa can’t tell if it’s an assessment or a suggestion.

“Chrome. Yeah, a real chrome jacket,” says Sprocket, as if that had been his idea all along.

“Shiny,” breathes a younger Pup, eyes wide.

“So the fire don’t burn the Lancer, on ‘count of his chrome jacket…”

Dagga grabs her elbow then, and she’s pulled away into a discussion about scrap metal distribution and salvage rights, and misses the rest of the story.

But something about it won’t quite leave her alone, and later that afternoon, she stops by the Skin Shop and then, on Toast’s muttered direction, down to the chop shop to talk to Capable.

That night, when she returns from checking in with the sentries, there’s a pile of blood-stained leather sitting on her worktable. She smiles, and goes to work.

...

She stumbles over no fewer than twelve other story circles over the next seven days. Several are reluctantly led by Max, looking pale and drawn, but breathing easier in the open sunlight. Drawing words out one by one like the women of the Green Place used to draw fish on a string. 

Once, she happens in on Capable, weaving a tale about a War Boy who didn’t want to go to Valhalla that leaves her audience sniffling and has Furiosa walking quickly out of the room. 

As the week progresses, she runs into other circles. A War Pup named Nemo retells a story she has heard before, about a crow who caught the sun in his beak and couldn’t let go (it singed his feathers pure white). One of the mothers, Abgard, speaks of a time, many moons ago, when the Wasteland was green and there was a great Sea and men hunted the creatures who lived in it like the Buzzards hunt the Citadel’s War Rigs. Sprocket becomes a regular favorite among the Pups, plucking stories from the air as easily as one picks up a handful of sand from the ground. 

The Lancer. The War Boy. The Sea-Whale Hunter. The White Crow. The Beast. The Dragon. The Road Warrior. New names on the lips of all the Citadel folk. New stories, new monsters, new triumphs, new hope. 

_Hope is a mistake._ No. Hope is _life_. She wonders if he’s realized it since, or is still realizing it now. 

_Feels like hope._ They hadn’t fixed what was broken, but they’d built over it - new scars to cover the old, new stories to banish the past, new lives carved out of Joe’s stone fortress. They’d taken hope, formed it into something firm and solid, and built with it.

She thinks of these things at night over her workbench as she stitches and cleans and re-shapes and patches a heavily scarred and beaten jacket back together. With all the strength and skill in _both_ of her hands, she and the rest of the Citadel folk will take hope and stitch it into every tear of the past, and into every seam of the present, until they’ve patched together a better, stronger future.

It’s what they’ve done for two years. It started with hope.

…

The next seven-day span passes in a blur of sand and engine grease and, finally, a supply run to Gastown. Hot sun scorching the back of her neck, dust and grit caught between every cropped strand of her hair. She bares her teeth at the wind and pushes the new War Rig harder, faster. The engine thrums under her boots and, as always, the familiarity of it all drives her right back into the memory of their run to the Green Place. Angharad. Capable. Cheedo. The Dag. Toast. The War Boy who wanted to help. The Fool who couldn’t _not_ help.

Memory rushes through her muscles. The Rig sings beneath her boots.

They’re back by the early evening, in and out with a newly-guzzed-up tanker before the dark settles in. Dagga claps her on the back, grins wide over crooked teeth. “Good run, Boss.” 

She nods, turns the bolt she’s tightening. Finally responds, “Good work out there today.”

Dagga _beams_. “Thanks, Boss.”

Furiosa just nods again, turns back to her repairs. It’s well past dark by the time she’s satisfied with the end result.

She winds back up the corridors toward her room slowly. Her route takes her past Max’s borrowed quarters, and she’s mildly surprised to find his door open. 

“Furiosa!” Toast calls from inside, and she pauses her steps, turning to stand just inside the doorframe.

Max is sitting on the bed with a pained expression - though it seems to have more to do with Toast’s doctoring than with actual pain. Toast, for her part, is peering at his stitches and tossing out a volley of questions: “Do they feel dry? Itchy? Have you been keeping this open to the air? Do you usually heal this fast?” Max says nothing, and Furiosa wonders how he’d figured out so quickly that most of Toast’s questions are just her thinking out loud. He grunts, twisting when Toast pulls a scissors out of the bucket she’s brought.

“They’re ready to come out,” Toast says, ignoring the way he’s eyeing the scissors. “Then maybe you can take a goddamned bath.” Bedside manner. Not Toast’s primary skill set. The bucket rattles as Toast reaches for a pair of tweezers, and Max twitches.

“Actually, while she’s doing that, I could use a hand.” Furiosa raises her metal arm, wiggling the fingers to demonstrate where one has been sticking. She’d been intending to make the repairs herself tonight - she’s been putting it off in favor of finishing her other project - but it’s certainly easier with two hands. And it looks like Toast could use a distraction, assuming she doesn’t want to get punched in the jaw.

Max twists his head up curiously. It’s the same look he’d given her in the canyon - _I may need you to drive the Rig_. But after a moment, he shifts back toward Toast, letting out a slow breath, and makes room in front of him on the bed.

Furiosa sits, fishes her toolkit out of a pocket, turns over the arm and lays it in his hand.

A grunt and a quirked eyebrow. He’s asking if she’d rather take the arm off first.

“It’s easier this way. To see if it’s working.” She wiggles the stuck digit again.

Max breathes out through his nose and bends over the arm. She can see him relax as he focuses into the task, visualizing how the mechanisms work together, searching out the hitch in the design. She nods at Toast, and the younger woman reaches carefully forward and starts in on the stitches. Max doesn’t even look like he’s noticed.

It’s a quiet half-hour. Max fixing and oiling and humming away, occasionally lifting his hands so she can test his repairs - turning her wrist, making a fist, articulating each finger - and Toast snipping and tugging at stitches, each thread making a soft _thunk_ as she drops it back into her bucket.

Eventually, Toast nods in satisfaction, smears a salve over the healing wound to protect it from the sun, and tosses her tools back in the bucket. She stands, patting the back of Max’s neck, once. “Done. I predict you’ll live.”

Max doesn’t look up from his project - he’s re-attaching a wire that runs up the inside of the smallest finger, and it’s tricky work - but he nods at Toast. After another second, he rumbles a “Thank you,” from somewhere deep in his chest.

Toast nods and leaves and Furiosa waits until he has the wire attached and then starts to rise. His hand catches her metal wrist. Holds up the tiny spanner from her toolkit, points at a bolt he hasn’t tightened. She relaxes back into the wall.

“There,” he says after a minute. She flexes the arm. Articulates each finger. Rotates the wrist and listens for any grinding or squeaking in the gears. It’s good - not better than she could have done, given the time, but a touch faster than her usual repairs, and with a studied attention to detail. 

She reaches up to her shoulder to tug the arm a little tighter again, and is surprised to find his hands there first, tugging, adjusting, smoothing the pauldron into place. His fingertips ghost across the edge of her brand, and she wonders if he’s thinking about the scars that cover his own back. She stands, reaches to tighten the strap that hitches the mechanism to her waist while he quietly slips her tools back into their pouch and offers it back to her.

“How long did it take you?” His voice startles her. So far, he’s reserved sentences of that length for the kids. They seem to be able to pull stories - and words - out of him more easily. “To build the new one?” he clarifies after a moment.

Oh. Sometimes she forgets how long it has been since he’d left. “One hundred and eighty-three days.” She takes the tool kit, stows it in her pocket. “I had something working in the first fifteen - it’s easier when you’ve built one before - but to gather the right parts and build something as good as the old one...it takes time.” 

He looks up and meets her eyes for a second, and there’s a question on the tip of her tongue for him, but she can’t quite form it from the vague feeling in her chest. It might be _Why did you leave?_ , but she knows that already. Or maybe _How long did it take_ you _? To forget us?_ , but that’s unfair and untrue, or he wouldn’t be here now.

Finally, she just says, “Thank you for your help, Max.” 

The words do something odd to him, and she gets that look again - confused, like he can’t quite process what she’s saying - so she repeats them, quietly: “Thank you for your help.” 

After a minute, he shakes out of whatever it was he was seeing that wasn’t her, gives her a curt nod. “‘Welcome.” 

She slips out the door and down the corridor, flexes her repaired hand a few more times. It’s good work - he could teach her Blackthumbs a thing or two. 

Of course, she wouldn’t have let any of them near her arm’s mechanisms. It’s the wiring. Capable could have managed it, maybe, but it needs a gentle hand. She’s not sure how she’d known Max would have that, but somewhere between watching him catch Bitz and a hazy memory of a hand at the back of her neck, she’d decided he could handle it.

She flexes her hand again, shakes her head, and starts the walk back to her room.  
...

Fourteen days after he didn’t die, she finds Max in the Green Room. He’s half-sprawled by the pool - larger now that the Dag and a team of masons had converted it into an aquifer of sorts for watering - and he’s just… _staring_ at everything. Shirtless, still, and dirty as ever, holding his splinted left arm carefully since he’s refusing to wear the sling. But the gaping wound on his back has closed into an angry red welt, and it looks like he got here under his own power, so all in all, it’s better.

The Dag is holding lessons and Furiosa’s come to - well, honestly, to have a moment alone in the quiet green, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to get that. So instead she leans back against the plant-coated wall, enjoying the quiet murmur of the water and the louder murmur of the Dag and her students, enjoying the way the climbing plants’ tiny leaves tickle the edges of the brand on her neck. Soft. Green. Damp. It’s a luxury to come here. 

She can see Max feels that way as well, from the dazed expression he turns on her. He’s probably never seen a place like this. 

He tilts his head, and she pushes away from the wall, goes to sit next to the pool. 

“Amazing what two years of water and sunlight will do.” She’s looking up at the ceiling when she says it, but he’s watching the Dag’s lesson group and nodding. She looks, seeing through his eyes for a second: the War Pups look healthier, stronger, laughing and interrupting the Dag with questions and commentary. They’ve lost the haunted look - and it’s only partly the lack of dark eye makeup. They’ve banished a lot of ghosts in the last two years.

_Greenhouse_ , Cheedo had called the renewed Vault, extracting the word from a book. A place inside, but glass and warm, a place that could be kept humid enough for plants to grow. Humid: water, in the air. This room would be something out of a book, as unbelievable as _satellites_ , but for the fact that she’s seen it grow, slowly, into itself. Cheedo had wanted to use the older word, but Green Room had stuck. (One of the surviving Vuvalini had smiled and called the new name perfect, something about the Old World and “a place for resting” that Furiosa hadn’t quite understood.)

All of a sudden, the Dag dismisses her lesson, and thirty or so War Pups charge across the Green Room, directly toward the pool. Max has one second to look surprised before the first Pups jump right in, the rest on their heels, and the water becomes a roiling, shouting, splashing tangle of limbs and faces. 

He and Furiosa are both _soaked_ in about half a second. 

The Dag jumps to the rescue, shooing the Pups out of the water and out the door to lunch, and when most of the crowd has cleared out. Max sputters and coughs and runs a hand through wet hair that’s dripping tracks of dirt down his face. Furiosa snorts, and lets out a quiet chuckle, flicking her metal arm a couple of times to shed the water before it gets into the gears. After a second, she gives up and reaches to undo the buckles. Sets the arm behind her, well away from the water.

She catches the scuff of feet and looks up. Adda, Sprocket, and Bitz have managed to escape the Dag and are standing, transfixed, a few feet from the pool.

Adda catches Max’s eye, and it’s clear she’s asking a question. Furiosa feels that look in her bones: Water isn’t for wasting. _Certainly_ not for playing. 

She glances at Max out of the corner of her eye, leans back and wipes water off her face. Waits to see how this will play out.

She _doesn’t_ expect Max to look at the girl, then shuck his boots and his brace - slowly, with only the one hand to use - and take two big, splashing steps into the pool. He tilts his head, and she can’t see his expression, but his stance looks like some sort of dare.

Sprocket and Adda stand there for a second, jaws agape, but it’s Bitz who makes the first move, tearing away from her brother to leap into the water, shoes and all. Max scoops her up with his good arm before she’s finished sinking, grasping the back of her shirt so she’s free to splash around.

Adda and Sprocket look at each other, then scramble to get out of their boots and into the pool.

In a minute, the three of them are shrieking and splashing and Sprocket’s trying to do some sort of handstand underwater and coming up choking and spitting. Max stands in the middle of it all, implacable. 

Furiosa has excellent reflexes. She had honed them to a fine point over the seven thousand days, and she has not let them dull over the past seven hundred. But she _is_ unusually relaxed, sitting here in the green, by the water, listening to the children splashing and laughing. She leans back, looks up at the plant-covered ceiling, letting her shoulder rest and stretch for a moment without the weight of the metal arm.

That level of relaxation saves Sprocket and Adda each a kick to the jaw when the two suddenly grab the heels of her boots and drag her into the water. 

She comes up gasping - tense, bristled, reflexively angry. Max turns to see what’s going on and his jaw opens, just a fraction. Looks like he does when he’s trying to dredge up words.

She forces another breath of damp air into her lungs, wiping water out of her eyes, and stares at the tableau: The two older kids look a little nervous now, like maybe they’ve stepped over a line. The youngest squirms and splashes in Max’s grip, entirely unaware of the sudden tension. 

And Max, dripping wet in a way that’s just smudged the dirt around, hair plastered to his forehead, corner of his mouth twisted in either a smile or a grimace, jaw still hanging slightly open…he looks like he wants to laugh. It’s an odd look on him, like an expression misplaced by someone else.

She levels them all with a flat, steady gaze, letting her flesh hand linger, lightly, just under the water.

Then she whips it to the surface and splashes them all.

The wave hits Sprocket and Adda in the face, glances off Max’s shoulder. The kids retaliate immediately, and for the next while, the pool devolves into an even louder splashing, shouting whirlpool.

Truth be told, it’s the most _fun_ she has had in seven thousand, seven hundred days.

Eventually, Cheedo comes wandering up from the kitchens to see why Furiosa has missed lunch (no matter how many times she's told the Sisters they don't need to monitor how much she eats and sleeps, they won't stop). 

Cheedo raises an eyebrow, then quickly blanks her expression and folds her arms at the dripping lot of them. Only the corner of her mouth twitches to show how hard she’s fighting a smile. 

“Imperator.” She nods at Furiosa, deadpanning the greeting.

“Max,” she says, just as level.

There’s a short silence.

Max’s bad knee chooses that moment to buckle under him. He plunges backwards into the shallow water, just barely managing to hold Bitz above the waterline with one hand, like a trophy. Furiosa grabs for the child reflexively. (Seven thousand and seven hundred days ago, she had grown up around water, and she knows the dangers of drowning as neither Max, Cheedo, nor the children do.)

Bitz just shrieks with laughter, oblivious to the potential danger, and flings her arms around Furiosa’s neck. There’s a brief second when the water of the pool stirs underneath, and then Max rockets to the surface, spluttering and flailing out his good hand to catch the wall. He stands there, gasping and shaking, for barely a half second before Cheedo says, still in that calm, even voice:

“Toast _said_ you needed a bath.” 

Furiosa’s own laugh catches her by surprise. It’s sharp and sudden, loud as an engine misfire, and it snaps Max’s gaze back to her. Slowly, his eyes track from her to Cheedo, who is also smiling now, despite her best efforts not to. 

A deep, rusty laugh rumbles up from somewhere in his chest. He chokes, snorts out a half-mouthful of water, then devolves into true laughter, half-choking bursts that leave him leaning, gasping against the edge of the pool. He raises his hands in some kind of admission of defeat, and sinks the rest of the way back into the water, using his good hand to scrub the caked blood and sand out of his hair. 

Even Cheedo laughs at that, and good-naturedly ushers Sprocket and Adda out of the pool, reaching down to take a dripping wet Bitz out of Furiosa’s arms. “I’ll feed them, but you should come down and eat dinner tonight, at least, before your perimeter checks.” She pauses, and when Furiosa doesn’t respond, she adds, “All right?” 

She’s halfway through nodding and Max says, “We’ll both come.” Off her raised eyebrow, he shrugs: “Promised Capable. One meal a week with the Blackthumbs. Talk about mechanics.” 

When had that happened? She hides her surprise with a one-shouldered shrug, levers her way out of the pool on one knee. She’s halfway through strapping her arm back on by the time Max climbs out of the water, sighing. He stretches out his leg, goes to strap the brace back on and snags it on wet pants. There’s a minute of grumbling and tugging before he finally secures it. She glances over her shoulder.

“Could take a look at that for you.”

He makes the same noise he’d made that night on the dunes. _I’ll make my own way._ “It’s fine.” 

She shrugs again. “Come up for a minute? I have something for you.” 

He stills. Rotates to face her, slow. She just looks back at him placidly until he decides whatever it is isn’t whatever he was worried about. He nods, and she turns to go.

…

He trails after her up to her room, limping slightly but moving faster than she’s seen him move since they’d dragged him up to the Skin Shop that first day. 

It’s not a short walk - they’re both mostly dry by the time they get there, and Max’s limp seems worse. It doesn’t seem like his leg, either, not now that he’s got the brace back on - his back, maybe? That wound was deep - had flayed more than skin, and Toast and the Recorder are good, but sewing muscle back together was perhaps beyond both of their capabilities. 

She taps the brakes on that thought as she pushes open her door, careful to block the view of her worktable. “Here.” She reaches for the leather, pulls it off the table as she turns. 

Max blinks, twice, in clear surprise. “That’s my jacket.”

_Fool_ is on the tip of her tongue, but she says nothing, holds it out further to him. 

“I got it from Capable. A couple of the Boys snagged the pieces from the Skin Shop and took them for scrap.”

He takes the jacket, turns it over slowly, running one hand over the new seam she’s stitched up the back. It was beat to hell before she’d repaired it. It looks _worse_ now, and those blood stains are never coming out - she’d tried - but Max stares at it like it’s a fucking marvel. He strokes a palm over the creased leather again, swallowing and working his jaw.

“I don’t think Bitz forgave me for cutting it up,” she says, mostly so he knows he doesn’t have to speak. “Maybe she’ll like me better now.”

“She likes you fine.” He says, rough and certain, still running a hand over the leather. Unexpectedly, he continues, “Dag says she’s saying your name. ‘F’rosa.’”

There’s an old pain there, unexpected and sharp - _not fit to be a mother_ ; _stole himself a dud, Joe did_ ; _brand her and hang her up with the rest_ \- and she lets a slow breath out through her nostrils, tamps it back down.

Hope, stitched over the past.

“F’rosa,” she repeats, testing it. 

He nods, slipping one arm into the jacket. He’s stiff and awkward getting it on - it’s got to hurt, to twist and pull that broken arm into a sleeve, and to set anything across that still raw back - but he finally gets it settled on his shoulders with a _hmph_ of satisfaction. Something in him settles too - he looks more like himself, suddenly - the one she remembers - and less like the almost corpse they’d pulled out of a smoking wreck.

“Better.”

He snorts, mumbles something about “ten miles of bad road” she only half catches. Hasn’t stopped smiling though - just that half-quirk of his lip - since she handed him his jacket back.

She walks past him to the door. When he turns to follow, his brace squeaks - water in the hinges, probably. His eyes flick down.

“Capable can get you a shirt - ”

He reaches out, slow, touches just the tips of his fingers to her forearm. Asking to interrupt her. 

“Thank you,” he says when she pauses. Quiet. Certain. “If you, uh…” He looks around, like he’s trying to gather words. “If you still want to look at the brace…”

She nods, knowing what it costs him to ask. “Tonight, after dinner.”

He gives her a grateful hum, and trails after her out the door.

She has windmill mechanisms to check and a full schedule of meetings before dinner. Who knows what Max is doing, but he disappears down a side corridor with a half-wave. He’s still limping, but she’s sure it’s not her imagination that under that jacket, his shoulders are a little straighter.

She smiles, and stretches into long strides that will carry her up to the windmills.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally. :-D I've made my excuses in the comments; I won't repeat them here. But I'm back now and be assured - the ride will continue at a better pace forthwith.
> 
> THANK YOU for being awesome readers. Your kind words and kudos restarted the stalled engines. And to those of you who are also writing and continue to publish amazing updates: I'm awed and humbled by your speed and verbal dexterity. Thank you for entertaining me when I was too tired to write, but still wanted to hang out in this lovely, lovely world. :-)
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING for this chapter: One-sentence reference to suicidal thoughts.
> 
> Lastly, um...I'm so, so sorry. You'll understand when you get to the end of the chapter. ;-)

They’ve been seen. It’s less than a mile later when the shadows of pursuit vehicles separate from the shadow of the Boneyard in the distance and the V8 is coughing - choking, whining, trailing smoke - and they might as well paint a fucking sign on the back that says _EASY PREY_. 

He can’t stop to do repairs, the engine is already redlining, there’re three sets of eyes boring into him and a hundred ghosts screaming in his head.

_you failed, you failed, you failed again_

_can’t stop this can’t help them can’t can’t can’t_

_RUN._ The world narrows. Sand. Road. His foot on the gas. The sound of the straining engine. 

He knows they’re done, but his survival instinct doesn’t. _Run. Drive. Fight. Live._

Adda whimpers, and his foot stutters on the gas. “They’re getting closer.” The girl’s voice is barely a whisper, almost inaudible over the whine of the engine. 

“Shut up. We’re gonna make it,” Sprocket declares. Looks at Max, something like hope in his eyes. Max wants to scream. He should have put a bullet through his own skull right after the Citadel. Should have known. You don’t get another win, a second miracle. It doesn’t get any better than that.

 _Hope is a mistake._ He forgot, and now they’re all going to pay for it. 

A _rat-a-tat_ of gunfire sounds behind them, _thunks_ into the sand. Unbidden, a memory springs to his mind:

_I need you to take the War Rig half a click down the track._

_take the War Rig ___

_half a click down_

_What do we do if you’re not back…?_

_...you keep moving._

_keep moving_

_Keep. Moving._

Another spray of gunfire, closer. 

“C’mere.” He grunts at Sprocket, takes a hand off the wheel to grab the boy’s shoulder, drag him toward the front seat. “Take the wheel.” 

The kid looks at him like he’s lost it. “We’re gonna switch. On three.” He doesn’t give the kid time to think about it, just moves on a mumbled “three” and shoves the boy past him into the driver’s seat. The Interceptor swerves a fraction, slows for a half-second, then whines and chokes her way back to her previous pace, but now it’s Sprocket’s hands at the wheel, Sprocket’s foot jammed down on the gas. 

He climbs over into the back seat, and the kid twists his head to look at him, panicked. “Look ahead,” he growls. “And don’t fucking stop.” 

Under the tarp, jammed between the floorboards and the seat, he finds the box he was looking for. Pulls it up onto the back seat, then reaches over into the front for his shotgun. Reminds the kid: “You don’t stop. Not for anything.” 

He turns. Reaches again for the shotgun, is brought up short: _blue, tear-filled eyes_. Eyes shocked wide with fear. _Sorry_ he wants to say, _I’m sorry_ , because he’s probably not helping and she’s probably half terrified of _him_ , but then there’s a _CRACK_ of bullets off the back bumper and he whips his head around. There’s no time to - 

Tiny fingers tap his own and he flinches, looks down as Bitz coils one hand around his left thumb. Pulls at him, like - 

\- like she wants him to stay. 

_A truck, a scream, roar of engines, another pair of blue eyes - glassy, scared, running, and then dead dead dead dead dead -_

His stomach roils, another shot tears through the trunk and lodges in the inside of the rear door, and he wrenches his hand free, grabs the shotgun, and rolls out the back door and onto the sand. 

The landing’s less rough than it would have been if the V8 had been pulling her full speed. Limping as she is, she’s slow enough to take the worst from the fall, so he only ends up half-winded. Coated in grit - eyes, skin, hair, _fire_ from the wound at his hip. He sucks in a breath and rolls to his feet. Kicks open the box and dumps the charges. 

He plants them fast - _antiseed_ , a voice whispers, then _watch something die_ \- and sprints for the nearest high ground, the narrowest point he’d seen - somewhere the vehicles that survive will have to pass through. He holsters the shotgun, tracks his gaze back to their enemies - thirty seconds, at most, till they hit the charges - then back to the Interceptor. She’s gaining ground on him, but still too close, too slow. 

Ten seconds. He flexes his hands, presses one just above his braced knee, testing its strength. Jams the shotgun a little deeper into its holster. 

Five seconds. He cocks his head; counts the pursuit vehicles. One truck, one bike. Two nitro-boosted coupes in front. 

Four. He flattens himself against the dune. Waits. 

Three. 

Two. 

One. 

A deep breath, and then a series of explosions that shake the ground under his chest, leave his hearing deadened and a pounding in his veins. He waits a second, two, for the smoke and sand to clear, then twists his head and looks: 

A single bike shoots out of the smoke cloud, a masked Enforcer crouched low over the handlebars. 

Too far for the shotgun. He’s got one chance. 

The bike’s fifty feet away when he launches out of the sand, skids halfway down the dune, and jumps right into its trajectory. For a horrifying second, he thinks he’s timed it wrong, that the handlebars are going to rip him in half, but then his shoulders plow into the rider's chest. There’s a screech as the bike’s engine revs and it swerves off course, and then he’s landing, tucking his head and neck desperately, half-curled around the Enforcer’s torso as they both slam into the sand. 

_Pain_ , stabbing at his lungs, neck, back. Black edging his vision. A knife in his hand, a weight on his chest, a roar as sound rushes back to his ears and suddenly he’s grappling - snarling, half-mad with adrenaline and desperation - twisting and wrestling and scrabbling in the sand until with a wet _thunk_ , the knife finally hits home in the Enforcer’s throat. 

There’s a spray of hot blood - _high octane crazyblood_ \- and he rolls off, streaking grit across his face with one sleeve - 

\- and he must have missed it, must not have heard the roar of the other engine, because suddenly there’s a shadow standing above him and a snarl and a sharp _crack_ \- 

And then there’s nothing. Nothing at all. 

__…_ _

Everything _thrums_. It’s a low, pulsing sound...like faraway engines, but if so, they must be _massive_ , and - 

The floor. That’s what’s thrumming. Flat metal, humming and grumbling and rumbling away under his spine. It’s also splitting his fucking skull in half, so he pushes down with his elbow, raises his head a fraction - 

\- and wishes he hadn’t. The pain shifts, stabbing at the inside of his skull now, and he fights back one bout of nausea before giving up and retching what little water he has onto the floor. Damn waste. 

He’s made it to his hands and knees, and he stays there, breathing slow for a minute, before he blinks and his eyes clear enough to focus on that floor. It’s red metal, pitted and scarred, and the humming under his hands wasn’t his imagination; wherever he is, it’s moving. 

He drags a slow breath into his lungs. Diesel. Blood. Sweat. And another smell that prickles at the corners of his memory, has him shaking his head with a growl to clear the ghosts. After a minute, it comes to him: 

It’s the smell of roasting meat. 

Fuck. 

There’s a _clang_ and the tramp of boots and he moves by instinct, gets his back to the wall. It’s a cage - bigger than the last one, smaller than the interior of the Interceptor. Dimly, it occurs to him he’s not bound, which means these people are either stupid or really fucking confident. His chest and his head both hurt like hell, and now that he’s moved he’s dizzy, nauseous again, but nothing seems broken and he’s not having his blood siphoned through a tube, so small mercies. 

There’s a second _clang_ , much closer, then a _scream_ and two voices, pleading, somewhere close by. He shifts back against the nearest wall by instinct. Closes his eyes. Counts to five. 

When he finally looks, a black-masked Enforcer is dragging a woman out of a neighboring cage while the other woman inside tries - fails - to stop him. There are maybe twenty other cages - side by side, some stacked two high - in the narrow room. It's a _larder_. 

The Enforcer drags the woman to the door, flings it open. She fights like hell in the doorway, and it stands open for a second while he gets her under control, shoves her through. 

The smell of roasting meat drifts in stronger - smoke, sizzling blood, salt. Finally, the door clangs shut. Max’s stomach growls, then rolls. He _knows_ what that smell is and _it still makes him fucking hungry_.

It’s a wonder everyone in here isn’t as mad as him. 

He angles his head again, ignoring the way his vision blurs, and tries to get a look inside the other cages. That last glimpse of the Interceptor, limping away, flickers across his vision. 

_don’t fucking stop_

He hopes they’re halfway to the Citadel by now. And it’s a mistake, it’s a fucking mistake, but he holds that picture of the Interceptor in his mind against the onslaught of other images - 

_curly brown hair, blue eyes, dead eyes_

_bared teeth, dead eyes, blood, blood, blood_

_three kids, three sets of eyes, peering out of cages_

_roasting spit - no, don’t look at that, don’t look, don’t look, think about the car, think about the fucking car, they got away, they got away, damn it -_

He’s got his hands on his brace - and the idiots left him his fucking brace, and he’d burst into hysterical laughter if he could remember how - stripping off one of the straps and flipping the tongue of the buckle into his hand before he can think. It’s an instinct - _get out_. There’s a strand of wire holding one of the other buckles in place, and he snaps it - carefully - bends the piece he’s snapped off to the right angle. 

He lurches to his feet, grabs the chain holding the barred door closed, pulls it around until he can reach the padlock. Goes to work with the wire and the belt buckle. It’s a count of ten before the lock clicks and snaps open. He’s rusty. He fixes the strap back onto his brace, tugs the buckle tight. Wraps the wire around again in case he needs it. 

When the next Enforcer comes through the door, Max strangles him with his own whip. The door _clangs_ shut behind his back as the man thrashes and struggles against his chest. It doesn’t take long. He takes the jacket, the mask, the gloves. Strips and pockets the weapons. Straps the whip at his side. He’s got maybe another minute before whoever’s outside that door wonders where this guy has gone. 

And he needs one more thing. 

_not things_

_We are not things._

He crosses to the cage where the second woman - the one who’d just lost her friend - is standing, staring him down. Takes out the Enforcer’s keys, opens the lock. 

She bolts for the door, and he catches her arm, hard. “With me.” He pauses. Rusty. Not just at lock-picking - at having to _explain_.

There’s a brief flash of startling green eyes, blacked with grease - 

_We go back._

_Back?_

_What’s he saying?_

_He wants to go back from where they came._

_I thought you weren’t insane anymore…?_

But those green eyes, they’d understood him. He’d searched for words for the others, but _she’d_ understood the moment he handed her the map. 

Maybe the moment he’d put those rounds in the sand instead of in her head. 

There’s a _wrench_ against his hand, and he realizes this woman doesn’t understand. “They take one.” He gestures at the dead Enforcer. “I go out there with you, maybe we both live. We go out there alone, we both die." 

She blinks, but stops trying to yank her arm away. He tosses the keys three feet from the nearest cell. A hand scrabbles out to reach for them, and he pulls open the outside door and shoves his “prisoner” through without waiting to see if it succeeds. 

There’s no one guarding the door, and it’s immediately apparent why. They’re in what looks like an upper level of the beast - the Scrap Dragon - near what would be the neck, or maybe the mouth, on a living creature. It's four stories up, at least. No one's going to jump from this height - all the Enforcers need to do is guard the stairs.

Off to the right, smoke billows from a bank of fires near the edge of the structure, twisting up into the sky like the thing is really breathing fire. That’s clearly the direction they’re supposed to be headed, so Max turns the other way. For the sake of their cover, he's meant to look like he's dragging the woman after him, but suddenly it’s him who has to pull her back, keep her from running and attracting too much attention. 

It’s louder out here - the _hiss_ of pistons and clamboring of machinery and that low, faraway rumble of the Boneyard rolling its way across the dunes. 

They make it down two corridors and to a set of ladders before there are shouts and the pounding of running feet behind them. Guess someone finally managed to reach the keys, then. It's a good distraction, and - Max rounds a corner and comes up short, suddenly nose to chest with an Enforcer a head taller than him. 

They all freeze. The shouting and running behind him gets louder, and Max jerks his head from the Enforcer to the noise, glad the man can’t read his face behind his borrowed mask. 

After a second, the Enforcer nods, raises his fist in what’s probably a salute, and lumbers off toward the sound. Max drops the woman’s arm, and scrambles down the first ladder. 

Three sets of ladders, twenty corridors, and a dozen false alarms later, they crouch in an alcove next to a repair bay near the tail end of the monstrous machine. The bay is chock full of vehicles, and Max is looking for a bike - something light, well-supplied, good tires - when the ghosts shriek and his head spins and the clutch slips and blood roars up into his ears - 

The Interceptor is in the middle of the repair bay. 

And there’s blood _streaked_ across the driver’s side door. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I'm _back_. Thank you all for your interminable patience and your support. All my long-abandoned fic was haunting me like Max's freakin' ghosts, and it's time to finish it all. Please shout out in the comments if you're still reading this - means a lot! :-)

She almost has to kill someone at dinner. 

They’re lined up on benches, Max sandwiched in beside her and Sprocket on her other side, and every time one of the two reaches for a drink she gets shoved sideways into the other one. She’s thinking Max is handling the shouting and the shoving and the close quarters fairly well - maybe the kids have been training him - when Cheedo appears, positively _beaming_ and announces a surprise that drops even Furiosa’s jaw to the table:

“Tonight...we’re having _meat_!”

At Furiosa’s shocked look, Toast grins at her from across the table: “They slaughtered some of the chickens this morning. Mina said the flock was getting big enough, and Cheedo figured - ”

The _plonk_ of a platter halfway down the table interrupts her. Furiosa inhales the scent - salt, something like the afterburn of a turbo-charged engine, and something absolutely _delicious_ that’s she’s sure she’s never smelled before but now never wants to stop smelling.

She gets to enjoy it for one second before little Bitz, seated closest to the platter on Adda’s lap, lets out a howl like a dying engine and bolts away from the table. Adda pales immediately and shrinks back from the platter, looking like she’s going to be sick. Beside her, Sprocket jumps to his feet and bolts after his little sister, but a War Boy gets there first.

The War Boy - Gearshift, she thinks his name is - is probably just trying to help, but when he scoops Bitz up in two strong arms and tries to calm her down by pointing at the food and explaining what a chicken is, she starts to shriek even harder, clawing and kicking and screaming like the poor bewildered Boy is trying to kill her.

Max tenses beside her, then flies out of his seat, and Furiosa has to tackle him around the knees to keep him from doing real harm to the well-meaning War Boy.

Toast, Capable, and three of the older War Pups rush to her aid; Gearshift drops Bitz like she’s a hot exhaust pipe, and Max gets in two good punches to Furiosa’s ribs and another to Gearshift’s left knee before he snaps back to himself. All the while, poor Cheedo stands on the other side of the table, still touching the platter of chicken with one hand, eyes wide and shell shocked.

It’s Toast who speaks first, a full minute later, when everyone is panting and glaring at each other and Capable is rubbing Adda’s back and Sprocket has finally gotten ahold of Bitz and is muttering something into the little girl’s ear as she struggles and blinks through wide, tearful eyes. 

“What the _fuck_ , people?”

Everyone’s looking at Max, barely verbal _Max_ of all people, for an explanation. He shifts his shoulders, jacket shuffling across his bare skin uncomfortably. “Had a...mmm, a run-in.” His eyes twitch to the platter of chicken, then back to Furiosa’s. “With some…”

And suddenly she knows, before he finishes the sentence. She cuts him off, explaining for the rest of the group before he has to: “Out there, the People Eater’s not just a nickname.” 

Toast gets it first, nodding her understanding. A second later, Cheedo’s hands fly up to cover her mouth. Two years, and as much as they’ve seen, these girls are _still_ sheltered to so much of what goes on outside the Citadel. There are moments she’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

It’s a minute or two before they get everyone settled down again. The children won’t touch the chicken until Max, infinitely practical, tugs a strip of seared flesh off the bird and pops it in his mouth.

She can see the exact moment he goes from chewing for show to actually _tasting_ the food. His eyes widen just slightly; his jaw pauses as he lets the meat just sit there for a second. With a short grunt that would have been a groan of satisfaction on anyone else, he reaches for another piece. 

“Not too much, Fool,” she murmurs. “Make yourself sick.” 

“Used to it,” grunts Max, chewing through his second mouthful. “Lizards.”

“Not the same thing.”

“No,” he agrees, teeth cracking open a bone to get at the marrow. “Much better.” 

He hands a piece to Sprocket, waving it at the boy when he’s slow to take it from him. Sprocket does, and Furiosa watches him sniff carefully, then stick the tip of his tongue out to taste the chicken skin - the same way you’d check to see if a plant was poisonous. He frowns, sniffs deeply, and then sinks just his top teeth in for a tiny, cautious nibble. Then the boy’s eyebrows fly all the way up into his hairline. He shoots an incredulous glance at Max and attacks the chicken with a level of enthusiasm that keeps Furiosa glancing out of the corner of her eye to make sure he’s not swallowing any bones.

Adda - despite Sprocket’s repeated encouragement - won’t touch the meat, but eventually tucks into the rest of the meal with passable appetite. Gearshift seems to forget his new bruises when Cheedo tosses him a drumstick, and when Furiosa hears him ask Max a question right along with the other Blackthumbs, she figures he’s gotten over the Fool’s very recent attempt to kill him. Food heals many slights, she supposes.

Capable grills Max for the better part of sunset about drive shafts and turbo-charging and how to get more play out of her rig’s suspension without sacrificing landspeed. Max grunts the simplest answers he can manage, often using his hands to talk instead, and one time even making use of the discarded chicken bones and some wire from his pocket to model the workings of a strut assembly when words fail him. The Blackthumbs stare with rapt attention until Gearshift reaches into the pile of carefully assembled bones and grabs one that hasn’t had the marrow sucked out. The display collapses and the War Boy grins, pops the bone in his mouth, and leans back out of Max’s reach. It’s _revenge_ , Furiosa suddenly realizes, and obviously the War Boy feels confident enough to make a joke of it. 

How far they have come in seven hundred days. 

Max raises an eyebrow, then tilts his head, acknowledging Gearshift’s victory. The War Boy’s grin widens, and a few of the other Blackthumbs laugh before the conversation veers off toward coolant system improvements. 

It’s several hours past dark by the time they make it to the chop shop to sort out Max’s brace. Sprocket has insisted on coming with them, as he wants to see the improvements to Capable’s new rig, and Adda and Bitz - sleepy after such an unusually large meal - have tagged along in their brother’s wake. 

Sprocket and Capable - and, surprisingly, Adda - head immediately to the center of the shop and start crawling all over Capable’s rig. Their soft _clangs_ and quiet conversation, punctuated by Sprocket’s occasional exclamation of delight, echo in the semi-darkness.

Max levers himself up onto a metal repair bench with his good arm and leg and swings the braced leg onto the bench, putting it at an easy working level for her. Bitz raises her hands to demand “up,” and Furiosa, seeing that Max can’t quite reach her from his position, leans down and picks up the child, settling her quickly next to him. Bitz leans around Max’s shoulder, yawning, to watch what Furiosa is doing. 

There are tools and parts here, hung on the walls and stored in bins and barrels and strung from the ceiling on chains - more parts than a drifter like Max would come across in his whole lifetime - and if she’s thankful for anything at all about Immortan Joe’s rule, it’s for his obsessive collection of _everything_ , because it’s these resources that are keeping the Citadel’s people alive and protected. 

Still, she doesn’t come down here often. Too many ghosts.

Max shifts on the bench, looking from her to the rest of the shop, and grunts. “You spent a lot of time here.”

“We all did.” 

Max nods, and it’s clear both that he’s understood, and that that’s all he’s going to ask about it.

She goes to work on the brace with her usual focus, standing at the bench close enough to brush Max’s right leg as it dangles toward the floor. The rumble of a nearby generator sets the floor to humming and, as usual, the vibrations sink into her bones, centering and calming.

The brace is a mess. She takes a moment to marvel at the fact that it supports his leg at all in this condition - twisted, cracked, burned - the support joint has actually _melted_ on one side, and how had that happened without melting his knee along with it?

She looks from the brace to his eyes and raises an eyebrow. 

He grunts. “Still works.” 

She fights the ghost of a smile and the impulse to actually roll her eyes. She’s not making light of what he’s had to do to survive, to get here. More marveling at the man’s ability to run on fumes for longer than most rigs could run on a full tank of guzz. 

“Let’s see if we can make it work better.” 

He nods, winces as Bitz leans on his shoulder especially hard, trying to see over him to watch Furiosa, then reaches back and wraps his arm around the girl, settling her next to him on the workbench. Bitz tucks her face into the side of his jacket and almost immediately falls asleep. 

“It was a good meal,” he offers, unexpectedly, after she’s been working for several quiet minutes.

She snorts. “After the fistfight?”

“I’m sorry.” _I’m so sorry,_ she hears, and that’s the Fool - always apologizing for his best intentions. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

“Tried to kill your War Boy,” he mutters, closing his eyes as she tugs at the straps that have apparently been fused together by blood, age, and sweat. 

_They’re not my War Boys_ comes automatically to her lips, used as she is to saying it to the Sisters, but she pauses, looks for words that will repair instead of damage. Finally, as the strap she’s tugging on comes loose, she says, “You didn’t try very hard.” 

His eyes blink open, and she lets him search her face and find the humor there. He stares for a moment, then rumbles out something that’s almost a chuckle. 

It takes her longer than it should to disentangle the straps, fighting with rusted, dirt-encrusted buckles and stiff, ancient leather and cloth. As she peels back each layer, she can see the history of Max’s repairs to the mechanism - the glint of chrome where recent, hurried adjustments have shaved away metal, fading to the ochre of rust on the parts that have held up the longest. _Archaeologist_ drifts up from her memory, a word Capable had taught her for the history-people who used to dig in the dust and uncover the past. 

It looks like it hurts. She’s spent enough time reworking the support system for her own arm that she can see the need for adjustments - the top strap is too narrow; the outside joists bend too wide along the calf; the mechanism at the knee is coupled just slightly too short - but she can see that it used to be longer, has been snapped off and bolted back together, shorter, at some point in its life. 

She takes both hands, metal and flesh, and checks for the space requirements between the brace supports and Max’s leg. The backs of her fingers touch his knee, and he flinches, hard. Bitz stirs against his side and Furiosa murmurs quietly, trying not to wake her, “Hurts?” 

He shakes his head, but the tension doesn’t leave his muscles as she probes at the inside of the brace, and he snaps his eyes shut, like there’s something standing to her left that he doesn’t want to see. 

She’s never seen him react to physical pain with more than a grunt. But she knows something about old injuries and memory, about ghosts tethered to a physical scar. She moves the fingers of her metal arm uncomfortably, shifting the weight of it on her shoulder, and goes back to her work, taking care not to touch him this time. He relaxes in stages, leaning back against the stone wall, eyes clearing as he focuses on her work. 

Once she’s finished her assessment, she crosses the room to rummage in a box of parts and comes back holding a tailgate hinge. It’s almost a match for the half-melted mechanism on the outside of Max’s brace. “I’ve got to replace this whole side.” She gestures with the hinge, explaining. He nods, reaching out for the new hinge to measure it against the old. He would, she thinks, be better off rebuilding the entire brace from scratch, but there’s a story here beyond the actual metal and leather of the thing, a history she can’t knock enough dust off of to see clearly. 

_If you can’t fix what’s broken…_

So she goes to work, removing the brace once she’s got the measurements she needs, then patching and riveting and welding as carefully as she can. Max isn’t quite sleeping as he leans on the wall, eyes half closed, Bitz clinging to his mended jacket, but it’s a near thing.

A sudden _BANG_ from the other end of the workshop whips both of their heads around until Sprocket calls a loud, “Sorry!” and Capable and Adda both shush him. Their murmurs quiet again, to below the volume of the humming generator. 

She feels Max shift - fully awake now, and, she notices, holding a knife he’d pulled from Mothers knew where - as he looks over his shoulder at the trio, then back down at Bitz, tucked against his side. “I, uh…” The knife disappears into his jacket, and he breathes for a moment before dragging the rest of the words out of his chest into the half-light. “I almost lost them...on the road.” 

From anyone else, a pause that long would signal the end of a sentence. She knows better, stops her hands on the brace as she waits for him to finish.

“Wasn’t.” Another long pause, reeling words in on a tow-cable. “It’s not - ” He stops, wetting his lips, eyes shifting to a spot in the corner, then forces his cracked throat through the rest: 

“ - Not the first time.”

_Oh._ She stills, remembering the haunted look in his eyes when he’d woken and seen Sprocket, but not the girls. He has lost, and lost, and lost - they both have - _everyone_ has - but the weight of that loss, the reason it had broken him so thoroughly, finally comes home to her now. 

_If you can’t fix what’s broken…_

He lets out a stuttering exhale she can’t begin to decipher the meaning of and she suddenly realizes: He’s _ashamed_. As if his failure to protect those children from an impossibly brutal world is somehow his fault.

And words aren’t her weapon - they were Angharad’s; even Ace’s when he was trying to rev the Boys up for a particularly violent scuffle - but suddenly, painfully, she knows what to say to him.

“You know why there aren’t any settlements between here and Gastown?”

He looks a question at her, confused, eyes bright in the half-dark. 

“We burned them out. Every one.” She bends down to rummage in a box of parts, trying to give her hands something to do as she talks. “Most of them just ran when they saw us coming, but there was one, dug into the hillside half a click past the Bullet Farm turnoff…” She comes up, holding a rivet that looks the right size, and measures it against his brace, trying not to think about what she’s saying. “Couldn’t have been more than twenty people. But they fought, down to the last man and woman. ‘Raging ferals,’ Ace said.” 

Max hasn’t moved, and she realizes she’s just standing there, gripping the rivet and the brace and staring at the workbench. Her stump aches, and she longs to rip the straps loose and throw the arm across the room. She feels like she can’t breathe. 

“When we - when they were all dead, this Pup - this kid, just came out of nowhere, with an axe. He took my arm before I even saw him. Morzan shot him in the head before I passed out. Thought he was doing me a favor.” It’s not the end of the story, but she desperately needs something to do with her hands, so she gestures with the brace, helps him slide it past his boot and onto his leg. His hands brush hers in the process, and she can feel the fine tremble that runs from her fingers into his. 

“There were ten other children hiding in the back of that hole.” She pauses, almost as long as Max would, but when she finally speaks, it comes out clear, and _angry_. “Ace and the Boys brought back _three_.” Retribution, for the attack on their Imperator. It had been one of Joe’s rules: Eight lives - to honor V8 - for the assault or murder of an Imperator. Eight children, to avenge the loss of her arm. She’d thrown up when Ace had told her. Ordered him to silence. 

In the absence of the truth, rumor had abounded - that it was the most historic battle to ever grace the Fury Road; that her arm had been taken by a monster, a chrome-toothed, saw-mouthed, metal beast; that the new arm was a gift from V8, crafted in Valhalla to make their Imperator even more like their god. And Furiosa had used their fear, used their awe, used their worship to gain _control_ \- to be certain that _her_ War Boys would obey her before _anyone_ \- before Ace, before Joe, before V8 himself.

She’d used death to win their loyalty, then dealt death out in return.

Her hands shake on the brace. She’s stripped thin, left all her rubber on the road, tracks plain as day showing where her tires are bald and ready to burst.

Max’s soft grunt brings her out of the past. She feels her heart rate ratchet down; engine no longer so close to redlining. Slowly, like it’s a gesture he can’t quite remember how to make, his fingers settle on her shaking hand. “You’ve, mmm...You’ve done more than enough.” He’s not talking about the brace, and she feels a sudden, unfamiliar rush of gratefulness.

_Maybe we can…_

_...together…_

_...come across some sort of...redemption._

She takes a breath. Nods. Then, as clear as she can make it: “So have you.” She jerks her chin at Adda and Sprocket, looks pointedly at Bitz. Max raises his eyes to her, uncertain, and she flashes back to that look he’d given her in the War Rig - _Does it matter?_ \- but when he looks back down at Bitz, the ghost of a smile passes over his lips, like the top layer of sand blown over a dune. He nods, almost to himself, and releases her hand to fold his good arm back around the child. 

_Keep moving._

_Together._

_Redemption._

She flexes her shoulder, adjusts the strap on her arm, and goes back to work. 

…

It’s a quiet half-hour later when Capable finally appears to collect the children and usher them off to lessons (Sprocket and Adda) and to bed (Bitz). Extricating the smallest child from her death-grip on Max’s jacket proves challenging, and by the time he and Capable have managed it (with several exclamations of “She’s _strong_!” on Capable’s part and several wordless grunts on Max’s), Furiosa has finished her work on the brace.

She steps back, tossing a spanner into its storage container and working the excess grease from her flesh hand into the hinges of her metal one. 

Max levers himself off the workbench with his good arm, stretching the long muscles of his back carefully. He lands on both legs, trusting her workmanship, then shifts his weight to the braced leg, testing. His eyebrows jump up, just for a heartbeat, and he bends the leg, feeling out the strength of the new hinge. When he looks back up at her, surprise is plain on his face.

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. It’s the face of every War Boy who’d watched her coax a rumble out of an engine they’d pronounced scrap. It’s Ace’s face when she’d repaired the turret gun no one else could salvage. This is her terrain.

“Better?”

He flexes the leg again, shifts to put pressure on the brace from different angles. “Doesn’t hurt.” There’s something like awe in his graveled voice.

She shakes her head. “Everything hurts.” 

“Less,” he amends. “Than before.” Then, after a second: “You, mmm...you get used to it.” 

And Furiosa knows what that’s like. One day, you wake up, and Joe is dead and things are _different_ , only _you’re_ not, because your suspension was tuned for one kind of terrain and now the Road beneath you has changed.

Seven hundred days of adjustments. It takes time. 

“Walk on it a few days. It’ll need a tuneup again once we see how it handles your stride.” 

He nods, reaches down carefully to rub the braced knee and comes up with that same expression of surprise.

She’s turning to reorganize a box of wires that are spilling out like snakes over the workbench when she hears him say, “It happened a long time ago.” 

It’s rare to hear Max make it through a full sentence unless he’s weaving a tale for the Pups. She starts, slowly, to tame the wires back into the box, feeling his tension at her back. 

“You don’t owe me the story.” This isn’t a barter - her arm for his brace, her story for his.

She could have organized every wire by color and length by the time Max replies, with a more emphatic grunt than usual.

“Want to tell it.” He pauses, makes one of those noises he makes when there’s more to the sentence. “To, uh...to you. Someday.”

“Someday,” she agrees, letting him off the hook, and she can feel some of his tension behind her bleed away.  
…

She has watch to take that night, and Max follows her straight up the stairs - and his limp actually looks much better now, with the new improvements to the brace - and settles in beside her like it’s his job. She’s not sure what else he’s been helping with in his spare time, but he seems to already know the lookout points and the approach angles he should be covering, so she wordlessly accepts his murmured offer to take the first shift. It’s not unlike that first night in the War Rig, their roles reversed. Her hands on the wheel, him curled around a gun in the passenger seat. 

On the Road, you make snap judgments about people - usually _snap_ , they’re dead. She’d looked at Max and seen a Wasteland feral. He’d looked at her, at the Sisters - even the War Boy - and seen _people_. Dangerous people, but still people.

Maybe that’s what makes him mad. Seeing everyone as people is harder - she’s learned that over the last seven hundred days. On the Road, it’s impossible, if you want to live.

Yet here he is. 

_...fix what’s broken…_

And maybe they can.


End file.
